REALITY: AI is creating jobs, not eliminating them.

• Data centers now employ more than 603,000 Americans, nearly 1.5 times more than our 15 automakers, combined; about 7 times more Americans than our steelmakers, and 12 times more than our coal companies.
• Each data center job supports 6.5 other jobs at companies that supply data centers (indirect jobs) and at companies that serve people who work for data centers or their suppliers (induced jobs). That’s nearly 4.7 million jobs across the U.S.
• There are 2,788 data centers currently under construction or announced—a build-out projected to create 5.4 million temporary and permanent jobs.
  • A McKinsey study estimated that an additional 130,000 trained electricians will be needed for the growth in data center buildout.
  • Google is supporting an effort to train 100,000 new electricians to power the AI boom.
• Demand for AI-skilled workers is growing far faster than hiring in the broader economy. A Brookings analysis of Lightcast data found that AI-related job postings have grown at an average annual rate of nearly 29% over the past 15 years, outpacing the 11% rate of postings in the general economy, and more than 80,000 postings in 2025 mentioned generative AI skills, up from 3,780 in 2010.
• Data centers are responsible for nearly half of all construction jobs in Northern Virginia, according to a report from the Northern Virginia Technology Council.

REALITY: We’ve heard this kind of doomerism before. Remember when the internet was supposed to wipe out millions of jobs?

• From the dot-com boom to the Industrial Revolution, history is filled with ill-fated predictions about the demise of jobs.
  • In 1995, economist Jeremy Rifkin predicted in his book The End of Work that information technology and automation would eliminate millions of jobs. His doom and gloom prediction was obviously wrong.
  • In 2014, PBS highlighted how Gartner, a technology research firm, predicted that”smart robots will take over a third of all jobs by 2025.” That prediction aged like milk.
  • Similarly in 2018, the World Economic Forum predicted that over half of work tasks would be handled by robots.