An anonymous reader writes: There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functionally unlimited cash that are racing to supply skyrocketing demand for their A.I. models. The explosion has offset flagging activity in other sectors, like office construction, which never recovered after the pandemic. Housing has been depressed by high interest rates, and offshore wind felled by political opposition. Still, competition for labor — never mind land and materials — is starting to weigh on other parts of the industry.
“There’s no question the resources are very limited, so decisions to build one thing kind of drag from another,” said Mario Iacobacci, who runs the construction and infrastructure advisory practice at Oxford Economics. Developers are paying a premium for workers, especially in the rural areas where they are building data centers. According to an analysis by Indeed, the job listings website, hourly installation and maintenance jobs at data centers pay 42 percent more than similar jobs in other fields. Behind that inflated pay is a bidding war. In markets with a lot of data center construction, like Dallas and Northern Virginia, workers can jump ship for bonuses or higher per diem rates. The competition has driven contractors to staffing services like Aerotek.
“It is creating a labor tension that is really delicate,” said Marty Schager, Aerotek’s director of data center market development. “You’ve got a passive job-seeker community out there right now that I think is looking to potentially capture opportunity with this once-in-a-generation data center gold rush.” [...] The question looms over the apprentices who will become journeymen as the build-out reaches fever pitch. Fully trained electricians could shift to nuclear plants, apartment buildings or pharmaceutical factories. But it’s hard to imagine anything on the scale of what’s underway.
“The best-case scenario would be you train all these skilled workers up and right when the data centers start to become less popular is we’d have a housing boom,” said Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “That’s probably not likely.” Joe Ottenbacher already switched careers, leaving early childhood education because of its bureaucracy and underfunding. He worries that an exodus of electricians from their $200,000-a-year data center jobs could depress wages for everybody else. “If we have an influx of workers at this point with the data centers being built, what happens when they’re done? Where do those workers go?” he said. “How many people does it take to run a data center after taking up all this property and all this land that could have been used for something else?”
