One winter morning in Quilicura, Chile, plumes of water vapor rose out of a warehouse-like building that serves as Google’s only operational data center in Latin America. Inside, vast halls of servers power the cloud, the invisible infrastructure that stores data and powers artificial intelligence. At 8 a.m. last month, when Chileans usually report for work, the campus looked empty, except for security guards who approached the gates when anyone loitered for too long.

Data centers like this are touted as engines of growth. The Chilean government and technology companies like Google and Microsoft have said they will create thousands of jobs in the economy. In June, President Gabriel Boric announced that Microsoft’s hyperscale data center cluster would generate over 81,000 jobs. At the same event, Microsoft’s South America representative, Fernando López Iervasi, said those would include both direct and indirect positions created by clients and partners. Some 17,278 would be skilled IT jobs.

Chileans celebrated Boric and Iervasi’s promises on social media at a time when it had become harder to find jobs amid weak economic growth. Chile’s unemployment rate has hovered over 8% since 2023.

While the companies’ jobs estimates promote economy-wide impacts, government permit filings for individual sites reviewed by Rest of World tell a more specific story. An analysis of 17 data center projects that underwent environmental review since 2012 shows they would directly hire no more than 1,547 full-time operations employees. These include projects operated by Google and Microsoft. The facilities on average offer about 90 positions, and some have as few as 20. **Former workers and local campaigners told Rest of World that most of the positions are in security and cleaning.

Construction workers inside Google’s data center in Quilicura. Cristobal Olivares for Rest of World

Another 32 data centers are planned to be built by 11 international firms by 2028, according to InvestChile, the government’s investment agency. Data obtained through an information request by researcher and Mozilla senior fellow Paz Peña shows those projects would add only 909 permanent positions during the operational phase, which lasts about 30 years.

“I’ve only found [employment] bubbles. It’s worrying that we have expectations that won’t be met,” Peña told Rest of World.

Microsoft confirmed Iervasi’s job estimates. In Chile, the company has helped train over 330,000 people in digital skills and helped connect another 300,000 rural residents to the internet, Zenovio Alarcón, a spokesperson for Microsoft told Rest of World.

Google and the Chilean ministry of labor didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Artificial intelligence and cloud computing have led to a global boom in data centers, with nations deploying incentives and tax breaks to attract investments. Data center capacity is expected to triple by 2030, raising concerns about the environmental impacts of the resource-hungry infrastructure. The employment potential of data centers has also been questioned in the United States.

A former data center technician in Chile, employed by a subsidiary of American phone manufacturer Motorola, told Rest of World he had six colleagues who worked as technicians on rotating shifts. Everyone else at the center was a cleaner or security guard, he said. He requested anonymity as he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

Most of Chile’s new centers are owned, either directly or through subsidiaries, by large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as well as private equity firms.

Their investments are the result of a push by Chile to become a data center hub through trading on its vast renewable energy resources to power the energy-hungry sector. The nation has already attracted some $4.1 billion in foreign investments through 2028, according to the National Data Centers Plan.

Most of Chile’s 67 planned and operational data centers are located in the highly populated Santiago metropolitan region. This includes Quilicura, an area in the northwest that has a dense cluster of data centers.

Santiago residents have been vocal against the development of data centers, saying they use too much water and energy. “To attract data centers, they’ve been given tax exemptions, and they’re being installed near renewable energy sources, but there’s no clarity on what they’ll do with [the] water,” Peña said.

An official at Quilicura Municipal Office of Labor Information, where local companies post job openings, told Rest of World that the data centers haven’t posted any job offers through them. “Those jobs are very specialized, they can’t be filled locally,” Alexandra Arancibia, a councilwoman, told Rest of World.

The government and the companies are pushing students to train to work in data centers, but there are few jobs, Tania Rodríguez, an environmental activist from the Socio Environmental Movement for Land and Water, known locally as Mosacat, told *Rest of World. *

“Data centers are like warehouses filled with machines and cables, and there’s little need for workers,” she said.

At the National Institute of Vocational Training, a college in Santiago, computer science programs now have modules on data center operations. The college works with representatives of Google and local telecom provider GTD to design the curriculum, Gonzalo Labra, the Institute’s IT and cybersecurity director, told Rest of World. Some 13,000 students are enrolled.

The students can visit a newly set up data center laboratory — a cold and noisy room filled with hard drives, servers, and load balancers that mimics a real data center.

“You can’t enter an operational data center, so we created this space,” Labra said. The program aligns with Chile’s economic goals laid out in its data center plan, he said.

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When talking about job creation, data center companies and the government prefer to discuss economy-wide impacts rather than the number of employees directly hired at the sites.

The government, in its data center plan, states that cloud computing as a whole — a vast category that includes almost all of Chile’s digital economy — has “supported” 695,000 jobs, accounting for 6.2% of gross domestic product. This would include all software developers, online businesses, and any worker who uses cloud tools.

A computer lab where Microsoft and its partners run workshops for local entrepreneurs.

Diego Cortés, an economist at National Pedagogical University in Colombia, told Rest of World that “jobs created by cloud services are not necessarily new jobs.”

For instance, a web developer may already be employed when their company switches cloud providers — a change that doesn’t generate a new position. “Putting in a data center doesn’t automatically create new demand for jobs that use that service,” he said.

Google has said its Quilicura project “supported” 5,520 jobs between 2021 and 2023, according to a report by consulting firm Deloitte commissioned by the company. Deloitte does not say how it arrived at the numbers, which include jobs created in “construction, engineering, networking, renewable energy jobs, security, and services, among others.” The report states Deloitte relied on unverified data provided by Google.

Google’s figures fail to distinguish between direct and indirect jobs, or permanent and temporary positions, Cortés said. “Most of these are indirect jobs tied to the construction period. The numbers need to be clear about what’s temporary and what’s permanent,” he said.

Environmentalpermits submitted to Chile’s Environmental Assessment Service show Google’s project would create not more than 223 full-time operations jobs.

Google’s data center in Quilicura is expected to employ fewer than 250 people longterm.

Microsoft’s employment estimates for its hyperscale data center cluster are based on a report by consulting firm International Data Corporation. It arrives at 81,401 jobs by including positions created by its customers and even jobs created in the wider economy when employees spend their incomes, according to the report.

IDC used an economic model that assumes greater use of the cloud leads to growth, which in turn increases hiring.

“The model assumes companies will save on IT costs and reinvest those savings in hiring, but that doesn’t necessarily happen that way,” Cortés said. “You can’t assume that jobs connected to cloud services will bring real benefits to the local economy.”

He said IDC’s modeling could overstate the impacts for Chile, as its data centers may serve companies in foreign countries. “The IT jobs created might go to foreign workers rather than local hires,” he said.

The Microsoft cluster comprises three locations around Santiago, each containing one or more data centers. The permit for one of its data centers shows it would create just 75 long-term jobs over 30 years of operation.