在加拿大计划建设的“超大规模”人工智能数据中心热潮中，建设这些中心的公司正在对其将带来的经济效益做出宏大承诺。
Amid a boom in planned "hyperscale" AI data centres in Canada, the companies building them are making big promises about the economic benefits they will bring.
EverWind Fuels 是最近宣布在新斯科舍省拟建一座 420 兆瓦数据中心园区的公司，该公司预测将提供约 115 个永久性的现场数据中心职位。
EverWind Fuels, the company behind recently announced plans for a proposed 420-megawatt data centre campus in Nova Scotia, forecasts about 115 permanent, on-site data centre positions.
该公司还预计，在最初的 20 年期限内，将为省政府贡献 15 亿加元的企业所得税。
It is also projecting $1.5 billion in provincial corporate income tax over an initial 20-year term.
在萨斯喀彻温省，贝尔公司表示，一项大规模的计划中人工智能数据中心扩建项目可能创造数百个永久性的运营和管理岗位。
In Saskatchewan, Bell says there could be hundreds of permanent operations and management jobs created from a massive, planned AI data centre expansion.
为了了解这类承诺的现实程度，CBC 新闻采访了在美国研究过数据中心经济效益的学者。
To get an idea of how realistic these kinds of promises are, CBC News spoke with academics who have studied the economic benefits of data centres in the United States.
佐治亚理工学院助理教授丹尼尔·岳（Daniel Yue）表示：“收益往往通过税收和就业分散到整个地区，而成本——如电力、水资源、土地利用和噪音——则落在离选址最近的居民身上。” 今年 4 月，岳和一位同事发表了一篇论文，公布了一项研究结果，该研究将过去 20 年内迎来首个数据中心的美国县份与未迎来数据中心的类似县份进行了比较。
"The benefits tend to be spread across a region through tax revenue and jobs, while the costs, such as power, water, land use and noise, fall on the people who live closest to the site," said Georgia Institute of Technology assistant professor Daniel Yue in an In April, Yue and a colleague published a paper with the results of a study that compared counties in the U.S. that got their first data centre in the last 20 years with similar counties that did not.
岳表示：“经济收益‘不大，但真实存在’，而且会随时间累积。” 研究发现，在首批数据中心进驻后的头几年，就业、工资和企业数量均有增长。岳说，在首个数据中心到来五年或更长时间后，就业岗位增加约 3.5%，工资增长约 5%。
The economic gains "are modest, but real," Yue said, "and they build over time." The study found gains in employment, wages and the number of businesses after the first few years. Over a longer period of five years or more after the first data centres arrive, Yue said employment increases by about 3.5 per cent and wages by about five per cent.
布鲁金斯学会高级研究员格雷格·赖特（Greg Wright）在永久性就业岗位方面表示，相较于建设数据中心所需的投资规模，数据中心创造的永久性岗位“非常少”。
In terms of permanent jobs, Greg Wright, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, says data centres create "very few" of them, relative to the size of the investment needed to build them.
赖特为这家美国智库合著了一项研究，考察了 1500 个美国数据中心设施的就业影响。
Wright co-authored a study for the American think tank that examined the employment impacts of 1,500 U.S. data centre facilities.
“很多数据中心管理专家都是从外部引进的，”Wright 说，他同时也是加州大学默塞德分校的经济学副教授。
"A lot of the people are specialists in data centre management, and so they'll be people who are brought in from the outside," said Wright, also an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Merced.
不过，安保和维护等岗位“很可能会从当地社区招聘”。Yue 则发现，经济利益并非均等分配。他表示，观察到的最大差异在于大都市区与农村地区之间。
Positions for things like security and maintenance, however, "will probably draw from the local community." Yue, meanwhile, found economic benefits are not equally distributed. He said the largest difference observed was between metropolitan and rural areas.
“在非大都市县，我们检测不到就业、工资或建筑活动有任何变化，”Yue 说，并指出将研究结果应用到加拿大各省需要进行外推。
"In non-metropolitan counties, we can't detect any change in employment, wages or construction activity," Yue said, noting that applying the study's results to Canadian provinces requires extrapolation.
据 Yue 介绍，农村辖区确实获得了一些收益，包括家庭收入增加和失业率下降。但由于研究数据中农村数据中心较少，这些估算的精确度较低。
According to Yue, rural jurisdictions did see some benefits, including household income gains and lower unemployment. But the estimates are less precise because there are fewer rural data centres in the data studied.
一种可能的解释是，城市地区已具备支持数据中心需求的经济基础和劳动力，因此更多支出留在了本地。
A possible explanation for those results is that urban areas already have the economy and workforce to support the needs of a data centre, so more spending stays local.
Wright 表示，建设数据中心的主要好处之一是税收收入，这可以为公共服务和基础设施提供资金。
Wright says one of the primary benefits of building a data centre comes in the form of tax revenue, which can then fund public services and infrastructure.
“这些数据中心将向当地社区缴纳大量税款，”Wright 说。
"These data centres will pay a lot of tax to the local community," Wright said.
然而，“历史上部分问题在于，社区也一直在向这些数据中心公司提供让步”，例如减税，这抵消了经济收益。
However, "historically, part of the problem is that communities have also been giving concessions to those data centre companies," such as tax breaks, which offset the economic gains.
他表示，新斯科舍省的数据中心提案体现了行业的新做法。提案方 EverWind 的承诺之一是设立社区发展计划，在缴纳税款之外为当地社区提供资金。
He says the Nova Scotia data centre proposal is an example of a new approach from the industry. One of the promises from the proponent EverWind is to establish a community development program with money for local communities on top of tax payments.
“针对数据中心的强烈反弹促使这些运营商意识到，他们需要‘甜化条件’，”Wright 说。
"There’s huge backlash against data centres and so these operators kind of realize that they need to kind of sweeten the pot," Wright said.
周四，新斯科舍省财政部长约翰·洛尔告诉记者，该省并未排除提供减税的可能性。
On Thursday, Nova Scotia Finance Minister John Lohr told reporters the province has not ruled out providing tax breaks.
据赖特称，还需要对数据中心的经济影响进行更多研究。他补充说，许多较新的数据中心建设规模要大得多。
According to Wright, more research needs to be done on the economic impacts of data centres. He adds that many newer data centres are built on a much larger scale.
加拿大广播公司新闻 为什么加拿大突然计划建设如此多的数据中心？您的疑问解答 超大型数据中心即将来到加拿大。一个省份处于风暴中心 赖特表示，社区需要保持警惕，确保数据中心开发商兑现其承诺和诺言。“在未来几年里，我们将看到……希望故事是个好结局。”
ASK CBC NEWS Why are there suddenly so many data centres planned in Canada? Your questions answered Supersized data centres are coming to Canada. One province is at the epicentre Wright says communities will need to be vigilant about whether data centre developers follow through on their commitments and promises. "Over the next few years we're going to see that ... and hopefully the story is a good one."