The Week the Public Answered Back

The analysis carried by Fortune on 14 July, by University of Michigan environmental justice researcher Lauren Mullenbach, is blunt: data centres do not create many jobs, though they can add to local property tax rolls — and it is the tax base, not employment, that draws small towns with few options. Michigan has seen more than thirty proposed in two years, exempted by statute from sales and use taxes.

Mullenbach reports from her own doorstep: the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority told the state it would not supply cooling water for a data centre proposed by the University of Michigan with Los Alamos National Laboratory, pushing the project into the next township. The point for anyone looking for work is brutally simple. Infrastructure drawing the power of two million homes employs a few dozen people. AI is capital-intensive in silicon and megawatts, not in labour.

Net job creation is concentrating elsewhere — in a hybrid role the industry has stopped treating as ancillary. On 8 July the OpenAI Deployment Company agreed to acquire Northslope, an applied AI firm founded by Palantir alumni, taking its bench to several hundred forward-deployed engineers who embed inside the customer's organisation. It is the arm's second such deal after Tomoro, for a subsidiary launched in May with $4 billion to spend. Enterprises don't fail at AI because the models are weak; they fail because nobody inside the building knows how to wire a model into workflows laid down over decades. The labs are becoming consultancies.

The telling detail concerns entry-level work: roles most exposed to AI are seven times more likely to demand traditionally senior skills — judgement, creativity, leadership — and openings for these "seniorised" entry roles have grown 35% since 2019, while other entry roles shrank 10%. The market is asking new hires for judgement that can only be acquired by exercising it for years, while deleting the jobs where it used to be exercised.