Apple's North Carolina iCloud Facility Not Generating Jobs

Photo Credit:  The Washington Post

Maiden is a small town in North Carolina, known mainly for its furniture production before the recession hit in 2008.  After falling on hard times, locals looked forward to Apple building a $1 Billion data center just outside of town, with the hope that the facility would help employ local residents, and possibly put a dent in the 10.5% unemployment rate which has stifled the region.  Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

The Washington Post is reporting that the huge new iCloud data center Apple built employs only 50 people full-time.  The heavy lifting that would have been done by hundreds or possibly thousands of people in the past, are now done by hundreds or thousands of servers, running software written mostly in Silicon Valley.  

Local authorities hope that Apple's presence will increase the local tax-base, and therefore allow the town to lower taxes for residents.  People remain skeptical however, as they were hoping for a more direct injection into the local economy in the form of jobs.

This scenario is not unique to Apple, as Google has also opened a data center in North Carolina, while Facebook has recently begun construction of a new data center to complement its not-yet-completed facility in Rutherford County, North Carolina.  Google's $600 Million facility employs over 100 people, and Facebook has announced that only 30 people have been hired full-time at their Rutherford facility.  This is probably not what North Carolina residents had in mind when these projects were announced.

So is building these facilities a boon for local economies, or just a psychological boost for a region mired in unemployment?  So far, it looks like the only people benefitting are North Carolina politicians and California corporations.  We'll keep you posted as the new data centers come online, and more employment figures becomes available.