Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and big tax breaks. The data centers were coming. The data centers came. Where were the jobs? people asked. The government would not say. Top secret. Trade secret. Can’t tell. The public must never know what happened behind those closed doors, when the government officials and data center executives commingled and whispered sweet nothings in each other’s ears.

Michigan legislature extended tax breaks for data centers even though the data centers that had already located there had brought fewer than 3% of the promised jobs. All those promises of great digital jobs were never going to happen, as John Mozena, president of the Center for Economic Accountability, explained to Scott McClallen for Michigan Capitol Confidential. According to Mozena, data centers are some of the “dumbest things a state can subsidize.”

“Developers say that companies will come to town to be near the data center, but only a tiny fraction of very specific industries, such as high-speed Wall Street trading firms, need to be physically close to the data centers they’re using.”

How did governments so easily fall for the data center jobs scam? After all, not needing to be close to where your data is located has been the foundational promise of the Internet and the Cloud. “Tax breaks for data centers are a fortunately rare phenomenon—tax policy that is precisely wrong,” Andrew Leahey wrote for Bloomberg. “They represent misguided state fiscal strategy, and the tide must be stemmed before more states succumb to the mistaken notion of ‘investing’ in data centers with taxpayer money.”

A typical data center is designed to last 15 to 20 years. Many can have no more than a handful of people working there at a time, “ensuring that workers were alone most of their shifts,” Julia Velkova wrote for The Information Society. Work is tedious, dull and isolating. Job security is weak. There is constant talk of further automation. “People are afraid,” a worker said. Some hope that they might get to finish their careers because “we are much cheaper than the robots.”

Meanwhile, a propaganda policy statement from the Irish government claimed that “employment in data centres are high value jobs.” Sorry, no. You have more security guards in typical data center than technicians. Technical jobs are basic and involve shift work. And any good jobs, they fly them in for the day from headquarters. In Ireland, by the early 2020s, data centers were employing less than 1% of the workforce, while using more than 20% of the electricity, with government ministers absolutely refusing to release figures on exactly how many direct jobs they were delivering because the numbers were so embarrassingly low.

A typical data center provides 10% of the jobs of other industries while consuming 10 to 50 times the amount of electricity, and who knows how much water. A Google data center job was found to cost hundreds of times more in electricity than an average Norwegian job. Google came to the country demanding 5% of its electricity, while promising about 100 jobs. The local and national politicians thought it was a fantastic deal. For the remaining 95% of electricity, Norway was getting three million jobs. In neighboring Sweden, when Facebook announced a data center plan, the country’s business propaganda machine went into overdrive, promising 30,000 jobs from the new industry. Facebook initially delivered 56 jobs, rising to about 90, while using as much electricity as a town of 27,000 people.

In the USA, it was estimated that data centers delivered five to 10 jobs per acre, whereas other employers delivered about 50 jobs per acre. A city north of Paris calculated that the employment rate for a data center in the area was one full-time employee per 10,000 square meters, when the average in the area was 50, according to Gauthier Roussilhe, who specializes in the environmental challenges of digitalization. Almost every day you can read a story about a data center planning to build on 130 acres of land, promising 15 to 30 jobs. A mega Facebook data center was employing about 400 workers, while a similar sized Mall of America was employing 11,000 people: 28 times more staff.

Not delivering jobs is actually a good thing, according to the Data Center Coalition. Who wants those silly jobs, anyway? “Not having lots of workers driving to and from data centers saves localities from having to pay for roads, emergency services and schools,” the Coalition said, with a wink and a nod.