Datacentres in the UK will create just a quarter of the jobs predicted by the tech sector, while consuming vast amounts of energy, according to new research.
Environmental thinktank Verdant predicts that all the datacentres currently planned are likely to directly employ 10,400 workers – compared with the more than 40,000 cited in projections by the industry lobby group TechUK.
Labour has defended the rapid rollout of AI datacentres in the face of growing public scepticism, amid concerns about their demand for water and energy. The government has also echoed TechUK’s claims about job creation.
Verdant’s analysis is based on 20 projects for which data on staffing levels are publicly available, including via planning applications, company accounts and press releases – as well as international comparisons.
It says the datacentres that have already been built have directly created fewer than 4,400 jobs – about 8.6 jobs for each megawatt of energy they consume, against the 43.7 jobs claimed in TechUK’s projections.
Verdant also argues that the many future projects currently at the planning stage are on a far larger scale, and so likely to be much less job-intensive – perhaps creating as few as 1.6 permanent positions per megawatt.
Its analysis focuses on the permanent workers needed to maintain and operate datacentres, setting aside the much larger number of temporary construction jobs needed to build them.
James Meadway, the thinktank’s co-director, said: “We’re being rushed into supporting a frantic pace of datacentre buildout on very flimsy economic grounds.
“Clearly artificial intelligence and related technologies have great potential. But vast new datacentres arrive at significant real costs to local communities and even our climate ambitions, and their use case has to be made by the government and industry – rather than assuming we can build first and then work out why we did later.”
To underline the resource intensity of the vast data warehouses, Verdant compared the 8.6 jobs they currently create per megawatt of power used with about 400 in a car plant and more than 3,600 in a hospital or health facility.
The government rejected this comparison, and questioned Verdant’s methodology. A spokesperson said: “This report relies on a deeply misleading jobs-per-megawatt metric, makes false comparisons with hospitals and schools, and appears to confuse electricity capacity with actual consumption. More seriously, it discounts the wider economic value of compute [computing capacity] and the national security and sovereignty case for building critical digital infrastructure in Britain.”
Verdant said it had based its calculations on the electricity capacity that tech firms claim they need – which could still crowd out alternative plans, even if the completed datacentres don’t end up using all the capacity.
Labour has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure in an attempt to speed up the planning process, and Andy Burnham has underlined his backing for the sector by appointing AI minister Kanishka Narayan to his cabinet.
Narayan has advocated a rapid increase in datacentres, partly on grounds of national sovereignty. He told the Times last month: “The British public is very clear that it wants strong defence. It wants strong, sovereign capability, it doesn’t just want foreign billionaires to own things that matter to our lives. If we’re being true to those British values, it is impossible to achieve that without building a sovereign level of datacentre capacity in this country.”
By contrast, the Green party in England has called for a moratorium on building datacentres, while there have been protests in Scotland, amid claims that massive projects are being rushed through.
Zack Polanski, the party’s leader in England, said: “The government is planning to steamroller local opposition so private companies can build datacentres – but it can’t explain what the benefits are.
‘“England and Wales are still facing drought after our hottest summer ever, but these datacentres are set to be given priority access to water. Meanwhile, this latest research suggests far fewer jobs may actually be created in constructing and staffing them than the government claims.”
In response to the Green party’s call for a “pause”, a government spokesperson insisted that it would “simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defence data”.
A spokesperson for TechUK said: “Our estimates that the UK datacentre industry supports 43,500 jobs, and could support 40,000 more by 2035, are built on a published methodology using industry data and standard economic impact assessment techniques. The figures were built transparently from the best available industry data at the time, and we are confident they remain a reasonable estimate of the sector’s employment contribution.”
