Part 2: How many people does it take to operate a data center?

Less then a week after I wrote about data centers, wondering how many people really were needed to operate one, news broke that atNorth will build a data center (almost) right in my back yard (norwegian, paywall). In my previous post, I noted that Nscale was promissing 200 jobs working in Europes biggest data center for AI. Well, atNorth just promissed the very same number, excluding maintenance, canteen, security and transportation. Translated: “When fully developed, we will have invested up to 40 billion and have 200 permanent employees in a local limited company, he says. In addition, there will be canteen services, caretaker functions, security, security and transport, he adds.” Note: The translation includes the word “security” twice, that is not an error. In my first post, I assumed that these jobs were included in the numbers from Nscale (and others). To be fair, atNorth does not promise 200 jobs from day one. They will build the data center in two stages, and the first will…