Construction workers build a new data center in Stone Ridge, Virginia, on August 12, 2026.
Brendan Smialowski AFP | Getty Images
The expansion of AI data centers is expected to support job and future job creation, but these facilities may create far fewer permanent roles than industry suggests, according to economic think tank data.
Mr Verdant said on Wednesday that the UK government and industry leaders had given the green light for the construction of new data centres, using figures from widely cited technology industry body techUK. It added that these figures overstate the number of new permanent jobs these sites will actually create.
Verdant, which advocates for greater control over data center development, estimates that existing data centers in the UK support around 4,400 direct jobs, compared to techUK’s estimate of 24,300. For planned developments, Verdant projects approximately 10,400 permanent operational jobs by 2035. This is around a quarter of the 40,200 roles techUK predicts.
TechUK’s estimates are based on the expected staffing and capacity of a typical data center, yielding a figure of 8.5 jobs per megawatt. Verdant said this estimate was too high because it was based on older, smaller data centers that required more staff.
Instead, we determined that the capacity-weighted average is closer to 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt. The think tank said it arrived at the calculations after examining 20 proposed data centers in the UK, using planning applications and public employee numbers.
Newer, larger sites will be more automated and require fewer permanent workers, Verdant said. techUK said its broader estimates also included off-site employment, such as contractors and supply chain workers.
It also said data centers create fewer jobs per unit of electricity than other major UK facilities such as steelworks, car factories, hospitals and schools, with some creating hundreds or even thousands more jobs per megawatt.
In comments shared with CNBC, techUK said its estimates were based on published methodology using industry data and standard economic impact assessment techniques.
“This figure has been transparently constructed based on the best industry data available at the time and we believe it remains a reasonable estimate of the sector’s employment contribution,” techUK said.
“Verdant provides its own employment estimates using small sample sizes that are unreliable. Furthermore, the report translates the economic value of the sector only into the number of people physically working within data centers, rather than the countless jobs supported by data centers and the services they provide,” techUK added.
A British government spokesperson disputed Verdant’s claims. “The report relies on a highly misleading employment-per-megawatt metric, makes false comparisons to hospitals and schools, and appears to confuse power capacity with actual consumption,” the spokesperson said.
“More seriously, it discounts the far-reaching economic value of computing and the national security and sovereignty case for building critical digital infrastructure in the UK,” they added.
AI boom
The UK government has made expanding AI infrastructure a policy priority. Data centers are “essential to nearly all economic activity and public services,” the company said. The government designated them as critical national infrastructure in 2024 in recognition of their importance and vulnerability to cyber-attacks.
UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said in June that future sites need to be more attractive and better integrated into local communities.
This comes as major tech companies are investing billions of dollars to develop specialized AI data centers, with Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon pledging to spend nearly $700 billion this year to build them out.
The data center boom has increased interest in skilled trade career paths. RandstadCEO Sander van’t Noordende told CNBC in March that the days of attending college are “over” and advised young people that exchanging jobs can lead to better career trajectories.
Randstad analyzed 50 million job postings and found that demand for skilled trade jobs within data centers, such as robotics technicians, increased by 107% between 2022 and 2026. Meanwhile, jobs for refrigeration or HVAC systems engineers increased by 67%, and jobs for industrial automation technicians increased by 51%.
