The Five Million Plus Jobs Created By Data Centers

By Paul Steidler: There is an increasingly common and seldom challenged charge that data centers create “few” jobs. The numbers, though, tell a far different story.

A May 2026 PwC study for the Data Center Coalition found that in 2024, there were 4.5 million indirect and induced jobs due to data centers in the United States, up 21 percent from 3.7 million in 2023. By definition, these are full-time jobs that support and are integral to data centers and would not exist without data centers.

PwC determined this with public data and the IMPLAN modeling system. For more than 50 years, IMPLAN has been widely used by Fortune 500 companies, leading universities, and government agencies.

The PwC study also identified 1,005,080 jobs directly in the data center industry. This brings the total number of direct and indirect jobs to 5,495,100 in 2024, which is well before the AI boom took off in early 2025.

Using conservative assumptions, six million jobs now seems reasonable.

To be sure, indirect jobs are real jobs. They include construction jobs, which are increasingly discussed in connection with data centers. However, construction jobs are just 3.7 percent of the total jobs. Sixty-eight percent of the jobs are in services, finance, insurance, real estate, and rental and leasing.

Data centers, which have a great deal of content inside them, are also important for manufacturing, as a September 9 Amazon announcement reflects. Amazon and Wiwynn, an El Paso, Texas, company that manufactures and integrates server systems and racks, the backbone of data centers, said they will “create nearly 1,000 new advanced manufacturing jobs by the end of 2027.” In Texas alone, Amazon has invested $100 billion since 2010, leading to 86,000 jobs in the state.

The nature of jobs in the U.S. has changed dramatically since the country’s founding 250 years ago. The growth in AI and data center jobs shows the economy is once again adapting and creating valuable, numerous jobs.