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The data industry lost 6,700 jobs in 2025, underscoring that the AI boom has created very few jobs.
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The job slump comes despite almost half a billion dollars of investment in AI development and data centers.
The AI investment boom has been a job creation dud, even within its own industry.
Despite massive investments in data centers and artificial intelligence software—an estimated $427 billion in 2025 alone, according to RBC—the year ended in the midst of a job creation slump.
Remarkably, there were actually fewer people working in the industry at the center of the AI boom: in December 2025, 477,700 people were employed in “Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, down 6,700 from December 2024.
Past waves of technological innovation have spurred the creation of new kinds of jobs that did not exist before, but those job gains have yet to materialize from the current tsunami of AI investment.
Tech companies are pouring billions into the construction of new data centers and are even building nuclear power plants and gas turbines to power them. Elon Musk says he is going so far as making plans to build data centers in outer space for his xAI project. But very few people actually work in those data centers once they’re up and running.
To the extent that AI is affecting the job market, the debate has focused on whether the software is costing jobs, not creating them. Several major employers have said they are reducing headcounts as they expand the use of AI. Economists have dubbed the phenomenon a “jobless profit boom.”
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