What $10 billion in data centers actually gets you

Road trip. Thought we'd drive around, show it to you.

Our tour guide is Bill Hanna. He's head of the East Mississippi Business Development Corporation. Basically think of him as Meridian's chief salesman.

And Bill says that big break could finally be here. This is the largest announcement not in Meridian and Lauderdale county, but in the state of Mississippi.

All this stretch of land is about 300 acres and it's going to be a data center. Campus data centers. These are those big computer packed buildings which are the backbone of the Internet and the AI boom. Tech tech companies are spending billions to build them across the country.

On today's show, why billions of dollars in data center investments will lead to a lot fewer permanent jobs than you

This huge data center project in Meridian, Mississippi, it actually shares the record for the largest private investment in state history. And it's tied with. Drumroll, please. Another data center.

Yeah, but for all this hype and the sci fi names and such, the data centers themselves actually look pretty mundane, at least according to Kartik Hasanigar.

Kartik is co director of the Wharton Business School's AI Research Center. We called him up to ask, what is the value of these data centers for the communities they're getting built in?

Kartik says the reason for this is because data centers are all about hardware. It's things like computer chips that make these data centers so expensive. By contrast, if you took a software company employing the same amount of people, it would actually take a lot less investment for them.

10% of the investment. I mean, that's like a, like a full decimal place over, right? There's a pretty big difference in investment.

That said, Ms. is giving these upcoming data centers a 10 year break from some state taxes. They just have to hit a few conditions like creating at least 20 high paying jobs.

Right now none of this means that data centers are cost free. For communities, in fact, they often come with a big cost, that is energy.

And the same is true for data centers, but on a much larger scale. Kartik says in some states, data centers are using up 5% of all energy generated.

Now, we have sort of been pouring a lot of cold water on this data center hype. But Kartik says even knowing all the drawbacks, there's still at least one really good reason why communities might want, want a data center.

And the reason they would want to be near a data center is because in the tech world, proximity still matters. Right. So it's easy to think about cloud computing as happening in the sky because it's literally in the name cloud computing. But the truth is, all these ones and zeros zipping through the interwebs, they actually happen in real physical places, often data centers. It takes time to send data back and forth. And being closer to a data center can actually mean having a competitive edge with things like faster uploads and downloads. So it makes sense that companies would want to be close by.

Kartik says because of the current AI and data center boom, companies are looking for new places to be hubs like Northern Virginia of course, it is still

And we did ask Bill Hanna, remember the chief salesman of Meridian, Mississippi. We asked Bill about these drawbacks. These types of projects don't have lots of people. When you put eight buildings out here and put 40 or 50 people in each building, you know you're at three or 400 people. Well, that's significant in a community like Meridian, Mississippi.

This episode was produced by Lily Quiros and engineered by Siena Alfredo. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Cake and Cannon edits the show and the indicators of production of N.