The rapid expansion of data centres in the UK will only lead to around a quarter of the number of jobs currently cited by the government, the environmental thinktank Verdant has said.
The UK government and the data centre industry has frequently cited claims from lobby group techUK that over 40,000 new jobs could be generated by 2035 due to the rapid proliferation of data centres.
But Verdant says the figure isn’t grounded in actual employment data from new facilities and is instead an extrapolation from older aggregate figures that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Drawing on a database of planned data centres, Verdant believes that a more realistic estimate for UK data centre employment is just 10,400 total direct jobs nationally, a fraction of the number claimed by techUK.
TechUK uses a jobs per megawatt (jobs/MW) formula to estimate the numbers of jobs to be created by data centres, which is used widely in planning decisions. Even when using the same estimation method deployed by techUK, Verdant...