

This article is seriously underselling the problem.
Yes, all of this is accurate, and its good data for people fighting back against data centres. They produce shockingly few jobs, and the most highly paid of those will likely be experts moved in from elsewhere.
But there’s a far bigger problem; AI data centres have no path to profitability. The cost of GPUs is so astronomically high and the depreciation so insanely fast that even if 3,000 - 4,000 data centres worth of AI compute demand materializes (it won’t; companies like Meta are already selling their own unused compute because demand is so weak), they still won’t be profitable, ever.
The article talks about how the permanent employment offered - on paper - is in the tens to low hundreds and that’s true, but the real employment is mostly going to be zero. In five years time 99% of these projects will be abandoned before completion, or turned into skate parks.





It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that the senile old man screamed at them to do it and they said “Yes sir” because it’s easier than telling the diaper shitting toddler he can’t have his bottle. They’ll have thrown together some kind of incredibly flimsy justification under one of the existing - but largely inapplicable - legal avenues knowing full well that it’ll fail in court but also that that’s tomorrow’s problem and hopefully by the time it does the old fart will have forgotten what he was mad about.
This is basically how most of “Trump does X” goes when you get down to it. The stuff that actually sticks is the big projects that he rubber stamps on behalf of his coterie of Wormtongues, while his own impulsive demands largely get implemented haphazardly and with little thought because no one besides grandpa actually cares.