open 24/7 with 180 workers

While Europe seeks technological sovereigntyindependence from foreign technology and How to accommodate your data centers in a system in which the electrical grid is saturatedAmerican Big Tech is establishing itself on the ground. Amazon is one of the most aggressive with its expansion of data centers and Spain, which has been showing its energetic plumageha conquered these companies with one name standing out above the others: Aragón.

In short. The community has become one of Europe’s renewable batteries. For years, its energy power has allowed gigawatts to be diverted towards Catalan and Basque industrial centers, but things are changing and, now, they need the energy for themselves. For the data centers that are arriving, rather.

Because both Aragón and Amazon have been making promises for months about how these data centers will impact the region and, finally, we can see how many jobs six of the data centers located in Villanueva de Gállego will generate. The round number? 180 direct workers who demonstrate that from words to actions… there is a distance.

The promised numbers. Amazon, through AWS, is going to fill Aragon with data centers. In the PIGA (the General Interest Plan of Aragon) it is already details that the idea is for AWS to build 30 data centers and a dozen electrical substations in the region. Villanueva de Gállego and Huesca will take part of the pie, but others are already being developed in Walqa, San Mateo de Gállego and La Puebla de Híjar.

During this year’s MWC, Amazon advertisement that they were going to go from less than 20,000 million euros in investment to around 33,700 million to expand their data center infrastructure in Aragon between 2026 and 2035. The plans are ambitious and they themselves estimated that their actions would contribute 31,700 million euros to the GDP of Spain and 18,500 million to the GDP of Aragon.

Regarding employment, Amazon itself spoke of 29,900 full-time employees in total, 13,400 in Aragon alone. There was a nuance: these calculations included those of local companies, direct, indirect and induced. Exaggerating, telling the baker who made bread for the sandwiches of the workers who build the infrastructure.

Villanueva de Gállego. Although the figure is striking, from the beginning has been reported that they are not going to be new long-term jobs, but rather very dependent on that first phase of expansion and that the reality would be very different. How far? Well, if we look at what was published in The Aragon Newspapersix of those 30 data centers will generate 180 jobs when operational.

This is the figure that Amazon itself has provided and that has been published in the Official Gazette of Aragon. In the BOA they refer to the report of the Aragonese Institute of Environmental Management, which is necessary for the American giant to begin the works and, in fact, it is detailed that they have four years to put these data centers into operation before the environmental impact report has to be reviewed.

It doesn’t close here. And, as we say, when they come into operation there will be 180 people between the six buildings. They will be distributed in three shifts and will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A data center cannot stop and continuous monitoring is needed. Is 180 employees across six data centers a lot? The truth is that the figure does not seem too large because even the largest data centers on the planet do not have that many workers.

xAI’s Colossus is one of the largest in the world and there is details even how many plugs there are in the bathrooms, but not a round number of direct jobs. HE speaks of close to 3,000 jobs in the region, but we are in the same situation: it is in Memphis counting direct and indirect jobs, not a round number of direct jobs in Colossus.

Bedrock. If you are wondering why so much computing power from Amazon in Aragon, the answer is Bedrock. The intention of the company is that these data centers are the basis of your service which gives access to models from both Amazon and third parties (Anthropic or Mistral, for example) through a unified API.

You can call multiple models from the same interface and Amazon takes care of everything else. The idea is that, being in Spain and closer to end customers, those who need to work with very low latency can do so more easily.

The energy problem. Aside from jobs, there is the underlying issue of energy. Because Aragón is a ‘green battery’, but renewables are not the best source of energy for data centers. During peak computing phases, data centers need a lot of energy immediately, something that is driving the use of private nuclear, gas and even coal.

It is estimated that the expansion of AWS plans will add more than 10,800 GWh per year, more than all current electricity consumption of the community, but the technology company has a backup plan planned to power its facilities. On its water reservoirs, AWS will build a photovoltaic plant with a power of 9,500 kW that will incorporate a system of double batteries and backup generators in case there are problems with the grid supply.

leaving environmental criticism aside And returning to the question of jobs, the estimate is that permanent and direct jobs will be around 1,800 during the period of activity of these data centers, which gives us an average of 60 per installation. At the moment, we already see that six of them are far from that average and allow us to get an idea of ​​how “the technological project largest in southern Europe“impacts the job numbers.

In Xataka | The great paradox of Madrid: the region with the largest energy deficit in Spain is losing the data centers