A $10 billion data center campus in Lebanon, Indiana, will employ about 300 people once it is operational. The Meta facilities, the company announced in February, will represent more than $10 billion in regional investment. At peak construction, the project is expected to generate more than 4,000 construction jobs. Once operational, the campus will generate around 300 jobs.
That’s equivalent to one permanent position for every $33 million invested. Compare that to TSMC’s semiconductor complex in Phoenix, Arizona: TSMC’s total investment of $165 billion in the United States is expected to directly create 12,000 jobs once all sites are completed and fully operational, according to company president Rose Castanares in an interview cited by TrendForce. That’s one job per $14 million, still capital-heavy but more than double the labor density of Meta’s data center.
The gap grows wider. Virginia data centers generate only one permanent job for every $13 million invested, according to a January 2026 analysis by Food & Water Watch, based on data from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership dating back to 1990. By contrast, it costs $137,000 to create one job outside the data center sector, about 100 times less investment.
The disparity is at the center of an accelerating national debate about what communities should expect when a large-scale facility comes to their county.
What facility-level data shows
The most automated hyperscale campuses can operate with minimal equipment. Facilities larger than 100 megawatts can operate with as few as 20 to 30 permanent employees per 100 MW, according to a November 2025 data center workforce forecast from the Hamm Institute. Industry benchmarks put permanent staffing at the most automated campuses at between 25 and 40 operators per 100 megawatts, Latitude Media reported in May 2026.
Announcements of specific projects confirm the pattern. Amazon Web Services plans to invest $35 billion by 2040 to establish multiple data center campuses in Virginia. This investment will create at least 1,000 new jobs across the state, according to the Virginia governor’s office. This is equivalent to 1,000 jobs in 17 years for $35 billion. Ark Data Centers is building a $136 million campus expansion in Ohio. The project’s final job count is exactly 10, according to Futurism, citing public records.
An average retail data center using two to five megawatts employs about 30 permanent workers, according to Built In. Hyperscale facilities create between 100 and 1,000 permanent jobs, depending on size. But even at the high end, the numbers are small relative to the capital deployed.
How data centers compare to other developments
Manufacturing plants competing for the same state incentive packages have different job profiles. Pharmaceutical company Becton, Dickinson and Company is investing $110 million in a manufacturing expansion in Columbus, Nebraska, creating 120 jobs. A new automotive company in Orangeburg, South Carolina, is investing $120 million in a new plant, creating about 400 jobs. Both projects cost less than Ark Data Centers’ expansion in Ohio, which promised $10.
The TSMC project in Arizona illustrates the contrast on a larger scale. The initial $65 billion investment in three factories is expected to generate around 6,000 direct manufacturing jobs, more than 20,000 construction jobs and tens of thousands of indirect jobs. A semiconductor factory of that size requires human operators to operate the equipment 24 hours a day. A data center of equivalent cost does not.
The structural reason is simple. Hyperscale facilities are designed to operate with very few people, and most of the capital cost is for hardware that is replaced every five to seven years rather than long-lived infrastructure that requires operational equipment, as Latitude Media noted.
The subsidy issue
State and local governments have offered data center incentive packages based on factory-oriented frameworks. Nearly half of state data center subsidies, 16 out of 36, do not require job creation, according to Good Jobs First, the nonprofit subsidy watchdog. States that impose requirements generally set them at 50 jobs or fewer per project.
The cost per job can be extreme. In one case, a data center in New York promised 125 jobs in exchange for $1.4 billion, or $11 million per job, Good Jobs First found. The average cost of data center “mega deals” is $1.95 million per job, according to a study by Good Jobs First.
Virginia offers the clearest case study. The state lost more than $1.6 billion in tax revenue in fiscal 2025 due to tax breaks for data centers, a 118% increase from the previous fiscal year, according to Data Center Dynamics, citing Virginia’s annual financial report. In fiscal 2025, the data center industry added 1,610 jobs and reported a tax benefit of $1.9 billion, or $1.2 million per new job, according to VPM.
What the research says about the broader effects
The picture becomes more complicated when indirect employment is taken into account. Economists Dany Bahar and Greg Wright found that counties that receive their first large data center see total private employment increase by 4% to 5% in five to six years. Employment in construction increases by 11% and employment in the information sector grows by 22%. Their research, published by the Brookings Institution in May 2026, analyzed about 770 US data center facilities.
In a typical treated county with 98,000 workers, these estimates imply between 2,000 and 4,000 additional jobs after six years, depending on the type of facility. But profits depend on concentration. Individual facilities produce modest employment gains. The benefits of the information sector require multiple facilities in the same area.
Data centers create local jobs, although fewer than industry advocates claim. Naive estimates that do not take into account pre-existing growth trends exaggerate the effect by a factor of three. Brookings research also found that siting decisions for hyperscale facilities are driven by power availability, land, and fiber infrastructure, not tax breaks. In placement counties, incentives account for a much larger share of total investment (62%), suggesting that subsidies may be most important for facilities that generate the smallest employment benefits.
Economist Michael J. Hicks, examining data center development in Texas, came to a starker conclusion. Their estimates concluded that the net effect of data center employment within a county is effectively zero, as workers changed industry subsectors rather than taking on new positions, he wrote in November 2025.
None of this means that data centers do not provide any economic value to host communities. Property tax revenue can be significant. In Loudoun County, Virginia, data centers generate 38% of the county’s General Fund revenue and nearly half of all property tax revenue. But property tax revenue and job creation are different metrics, and communities evaluating data center proposals should know which one they are being offered.
