The Jobs That Never Came

Indiana's data center gamble and the fine print nobody read

Land Promised, Purpose Betrayed | In Other News

When Indiana's governor stood up to announce a new Google data center in the northeast corner of the state, he touted 200 jobs. It was a good headline. It was also, as it turns out, not a promise Google was ever legally required to keep.

Indiana's state data center subsidy program does not require job creation as a condition of the tax break. According to research from the nonprofit watchdog Good Jobs First, the local property tax abatement agreement covering Google's project obligates the company to create just 30 jobs, a fifteenth of the number announced at the press conference. Nothing in the state incentive package requires more.

Amazon's Indiana project tells a similar story at larger scale. The company's public announcements pointed to just over 1,000 jobs. The binding local subsidy agreement stipulates 400. The remaining 600 will belong not to Amazon but to subcontractors, and even the 400 figure is not guaranteed until "full development," meaning after all 16 planned data centers on the site are built out.

"Almost half of state data center subsidies, 16 out of 36, do not require job creation."

A national pattern, not a local one

Indiana is not an outlier. Good Jobs First's review of subsidy programs nationwide found that of 36 state programs, 16 impose no job creation requirement at all. Among the states that do, the bar is set low: New Jersey requires 100 jobs per project, but most states cap the requirement at 50 or fewer, a fraction of what manufacturing incentive programs typically demand for comparable public investment.

Transparency compounds the problem. Only four states, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada and Ohio, publish how many jobs a data center promises to create, and not one state discloses both the jobs promised and the jobs actually delivered. Nevada is the only state that reports wages for permanent data center jobs at all, and the most recent figures, from 2021 and 2022, show workers earning roughly 31 dollars an hour, about 65,000 dollars a year, less than the headline figures typically floated during project announcements.

Construction jobs, the category most often cited in glossy renderings and press releases, evaporate almost as fast as they appear. A Cologix facility in Columbus, Ohio supported an average of 146 workers on site, but the work lasted about six and a half weeks before crews moved on to the next project. Many of those workers are traveling specialists who follow the data center boom from state to state rather than local hires building a career.

The ratepayer side of the ledger

Job counts are only half the equation. Indiana utility American Electric Power subsidiary I&M has proposed more than 7 billion dollars in new generation to serve Amazon and Google's Indiana data centers, a plan that watchdog group Citizens Action Coalition argues does not assign 80 percent of costs to the data centers as promised by state legislators, despite requirements under state law that any such plan preserve "affordable electric service" for other ratepayers. CAC's analysis found the plan would rely on natural gas for 85 percent of its generation, producing more climate emissions than five of Indiana's coal plants combined.

Wholesale power markets are already feeling the strain. According to the PJM Interconnection's Independent Market Monitor, data center demand helped push capacity auction prices up by 9.3 billion dollars in the 2025 to 2026 auction cycle alone, with further increases already locked in for 2026 to 2028. Those costs ripple through the grid to everyday customers who never signed up to subsidize a server farm.

Not every deal looks the same. Amazon has structured a separate 15 billion dollar Northern Indiana investment through a new NIPSCO subsidiary designed to have Amazon cover the cost of new power infrastructure directly, an arrangement the company says will save existing ratepayers roughly 1 billion dollars over 15 years. Whether that structure becomes the industry standard, or remains the exception that proves the rule, is one of the open questions hanging over the next wave of Indiana projects.

The gap between the pitch and the paperwork

Approximately 60 large AI hyperscale data centers have been proposed across Indiana in the past two years. Several are already running. The pattern that has emerged, hundreds or thousands of jobs promised in public, a fraction of that guaranteed in the signed contract, is not unique to any one company or any one state. It is a structural feature of how these deals get made: announcement first, disclosure later, and enforcement almost never.

Brookings research cited by industry analysts finds that data centers do lift local employment modestly, by 4 to 5 percent over five to six years, with construction employment rising roughly 11 percent during the build phase. Those are real effects. But they are also, consistently, a fraction of what gets announced at the podium.

Communities are not wrong to want the investment. They are wrong to trust the press release over the contract. Until states require that promised job numbers and binding job numbers be the same number, published side by side, in plain language, the gap between what gets announced and what gets delivered will keep functioning exactly the way it functions now: as a subsidy for the story, not the jobs.

Sources: Good Jobs First ("Will data center job creation live up to hype?" and "Cloudy Data, Costly Deals"), Citizens Action Coalition, Earthjustice, Data Center Frontier, Construction Dive, Amazon corporate newsroom.