On June 9, Amazon announced its plans to invest $20 billion in Pennsylvania to expand the company’s data center infrastructure and support AI and cloud-computing technologies.
In addition to giant facilities, the company says it will bring thousands of construction jobs and create 1,250 new high-skilled roles, like data center engineers and network specialists.
“For too long, we’ve watched as talents across Pennsylvania got hollowed out and left behind,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said at the news conference announcing the deal. “No more. Now is our time to rebuild those communities and invest in them. This investment in Pennsylvania starts reversing that trend.”
Amazon said in its press release it will “bring training and education programs, including data center technician programs, fiber optic fusion splicing workshops, and STEM awareness and learning opportunities for K–12 schools.”
But Professor Benjamin Lee, a computer and information science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has concerns about the predicted effect on employment.
“In general, I’m not optimistic about data center construction leading to a huge number of new jobs or a large amount of economic activity beyond the construction of it, partly because most data centers are operated autonomously, or with fairly mature software infrastructure,” Lee told IT Brew. “After the data center is built, we may not see a huge number of highly paid jobs, for example, to support that data.”
In December 2024, Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission reviewed the impacts of the data center industry in the state. The report found that Northern Virginia constitutes “13 percent of all reported data center operational capacity globally and 25 percent of capacity in the Americas.”
The study predicted economic benefits, including:
- Additional jobs at the in-state suppliers and service industries supporting the original business of constructing new buildings and purchasing vehicles and equipment.
- Benefits of “higher paying jobs” from “well-resourced” pockets of data center companies.
- “Knock on” economic effects by “indirectly attracting other related technology business, which help create a well-trained regional IT work force.”
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Lee sees data center power management and diagnostics handled via network access—“in fairly automated and remote ways.”
“Where you can’t automate data center management away, of course, is when hardware components fail and you need someone to go in and replace those specific components. And at scale, with so many components within a data center, you pretty much will need to replace hardware at a fairly regular intervals, because, just statistically, things will fail in large numbers when you have so many different components,” Lee said.
Amazon reportedly plans to build a data center next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant. While Lee acknowledges the deal allows more players in the AI and the tech industry to access CPUs and GPUs, he does not see Amazon’s investment automatically making Pennsylvania a major tech hub.
“I think it’s unfortunate, but data centers can be built anywhere, and then you access them through the internet, so the fact that it’s here in Pennsylvania may not necessarily translate to broader economic activity. The AI software development and AI hardware design can easily happen elsewhere. So, it’d be great to see more activity in Pennsylvania, but we’re not quite seeing that just through the construction of data centers.”
Amazon spokesperson Duncan Neasham referred us to the company’s June 9 announcement and Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission study when reached for comment.