Is that comparison similar square footage? I know of factories that have 10 employees and are small machine shops, and factories that have a few thousand employees (even ones that are highly automated). The difference is scale.
I’m not sure square footage is what matters here, though comparing the overall market for datacenter/manufacturing jobs would be more useful than individual installations anyway. It’s not like the U.S. is hurting for physical space in which to put factories or data centers. Speed of light isn’t that slow — the big New York IXP is actually in New Jersey and it would be fine even if it was further away.
Yes, but I'm comparing a specific factory with a specific data center that I happen to know enough about to compare. There are larger factories that have more people.
The factory I'm thinking of had 2000 people in 1950, and around 250 today - while producing the same amount of product. Automation is continuing to come to that factory - there are number of things that could be automated but their volumes are not quite high enough today to justify the upfront costs.
