On CNBC’s Squawk on the Street this morning, Jim Cramer looked at the June jobs data and told Carl Quintanilla he cannot square what he is reading with what he is seeing. June payrolls printed +57,000, roughly half of consensus, while the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2%, a one-year low. For Cramer, the location of the softness is what rankles. Construction and manufacturing should be lit up, and they are flat.
“The biggest story in this country is the growth of the data center. Where is it in these numbers? Construction. Manufacturing, nothing,” he said, before invoking former Fed governor Kevin Warsh and adding that “we can’t take this seriously.” Then the money line. “I don’t know how to trust this.”
Cramer’s big disconnect
If you believe capex plans from a handful of hyperscalers, the U.S. is in the middle of the largest private construction cycle in a generation, and the payroll survey is not picking it up. Cramer is not entirely making it up.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) raised its full-year 2026 capex guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from the prior $115 billion to $135 billion range, and spent $19.0 billion in Q1 2026 alone, a 46.8% jump year over year. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is guiding Q2 fiscal 2027 revenue of $91.0 billion and sitting on $119 billion in total supply commitments, which is the accounting way of saying it has already promised to buy an enormous amount of stuff that other people have to build. Jensen Huang called it “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.”
You would expect that to leave a fingerprint on the establishment survey. Cramer says it does not.
Where are the data center jobs?
His second complaint stretches beyond AI. “We have data center build, which is remarkable. And we have oil and gas, which is at a high going higher because of Iran. We have warehousing at an amazing numbers because of what’s going on with e-commerce. And we have little to no change in those jobs,” he said.
The oil piece is real. The EIA’s May Short-Term Energy Outlook flagged a U.S. blockade against Iranian oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, and Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) just reported underlying Q1 earnings of $8.77 billion versus $7.58 billion a year earlier, with upstream production of 4.6 million oil-equivalent barrels per day and first LNG cargo from Golden Pass Train 1 in April 2026. Details in the Q1 8-K filing. WTI is at $73.59 the week of June 26, off the April peak near $105.67, which is Cramer’s “inching toward 67” concern about China not soaking up idle Iranian barrels. Prices are moving. Employment in the sector, per the report, is not.
Data centers, once built, do not employ many people. Studies estimate the average data center employs about 43 workers per 100 megawatts, with the bulk of the labor concentrated in temporary construction crews. Construction payrolls have risen over the past three to four months but remain modest at around 11,000. So Cramer’s frustration is directionally right and quantitatively awkward at the same time.
The immigration angle
Quintanilla surfaced the piece that ties this together. “We have and we’ve talked about labor supply getting pinched, right, because of immigration and a bunch of other things,” he said. Cramer took it further. “META’s putting together this plan because they can’t find enough workers to put to build data centers… Every single one of these companies is traumatized by trying to find enough workers.”
If that is true, the payroll survey may simply be misread. A weak headline number with a falling unemployment rate is consistent with fewer people available to hire. Private payrolls have now fallen for a third straight month, and BLS survey response rates have collapsed over the past decade, which is why the April and May 2026 payroll figures are still flagged preliminary and subject to revision.
Cramer’s read is one interpretation. But when Meta is flagging “employee compensation for technical talent” as a 2026 expense driver, Exxon is pumping at record rates, and NVIDIA has $119 billion of orders staged behind it, a headline of +57,000 with jobless claims still at 215,000 is worth reading twice before drawing conclusions about a slowing economy.
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