I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.
Industrial electricians have always been in the boom-bust cycle.
IBEW (Union electricians) have been doing really well this decade. Another option if you don't want to be a contractor or an Anthropic employee. But they've also gone years without enough work to go around.
I was in the IBEW when I was doing basic tech support for HawaiianTel 15 years ago... making $15/hr, union dues were nothing even at that wage and they rarely ever go up.
This cry of "OMG dues suck" is so stupid for what you get in return. But go ahead and buy more into republican propaganda.
Yeah, working people should never sit across each other at a table and discuss mutually beneficial things. For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes.
Very true, it is difficult to even find an opening for the training to start the process, the schools are limited and have short enrollment windows that are fiercely competitive (at least in California).
I applied for an apprenticeship several years ago when I was testing the waters to rotate out of tech after covid. Tested into the highest percentile, had previous high voltage experience with OEMs, a mech eng degree, still ended up like 200 people deep in the queue. That was the end of that interest. You basically have to be friends or family with someone to get into IBEW.
Yeah, but you might still want to enter the field based on the aging of the current workforce. Seems likely to be a shortage of electricians over the next while.
On a third hand, electricity is just movement of electrons.
While DC is driving electrons down the line, AC is basically just when you vibrate them around.
Anyway my point is the field (no pun intended) may change drastically in the increasingly electrified future. I'm personally excited for more wireless power in areas, and the concept of ambient energy - harvesting power out of the already vibrating electrons in the static in the air.
I feel like we're entering an age of electrification so having training/education in a field related to electrics/electronics seems like a reasonable path for someone to take.
The conversion to all-electric homes is more recent, and hasn't even started in some places. Here in Canada, some jurisdictions require newly constructed houses and apartments to have electric heat and cooling (heat pump, with resistive heat as a backup), an electric dryer and stove, and an electric water heater (tank or tankless). Others jurisdictions are still using gas furnaces and gas-fired hot water tanks.
All electric homes existed as far back as the 1960s. Gas heat was generally cheaper back then (heat pump? nobody has air conditioning then) so they were not common where it got cold. Even at that though, the difference in labor for an all electric house today vs the same house with gas appliances is minimal - you get larger wires to the stove, furnace and dryer, everything else is the same. (in the near future I expect to see wires for the EV as well, but not yet and in any case this is the same even if your other appliances are gas)
I live in one of those all electric homes too, made in the 2000s. Doesn't change that a bust will dry up the work and homeowners won't fork over the money for something that has few benefits for their daily life and requires expensive changes to the house.
To add to this there are jurisdictions that will require you to still pay a small monthly fee to support the gas pipes if you cut off gas service.
It is really nice not having a gas bill and not requiring maintenance for gas appliances, but most people won't care if they lived with it for long enough.
The only case I see it working is in a disaster area or blighted areas where the builder decided to bulldoze and rebuild the houses. The southern California fires for example; the city gave priority to permits to houses that went all electric since the gas pipes were destroyed. Permitting and inspection is so much simpler with all electric.
Sure, but these also aren't professions that will disappear when data center demand goes down or will get automated away in the long term.
I’d go as far as to say that for someone in their teens electrician (or trades in general) is a more stable long term career path than software engineer.
> The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in.
HVAC and electrical (e.g. UPSes) need somewhat regular maintenance, so once build-out is done, if you're with one of the OEMs, you'll probably have regular work babysitting the gear.
I'd imagine those 300K years they're not just working 40 hours a week, more like 70+ hours. Add higher taxes on those years and it becomes less attractive.
I mean, no career is ever perfectly secure against future uncertainty (a few years ago I would've joked "... except prostitution", but even that seems threatened by AI these days). The question is a relative one: how stable is it compared to feasible alternatives? I could certainly see job losses and wage stagnation in software engineering being worse than those of electricians over the next 15 years.
Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables.
All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.
Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.
Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor? And do you scrutinize every construction project or only AI?
Is it a waste when contractors build a temporary set for a trashy reality TV show? A factory that makes cosmetics for dogs?
Having someone the arbiter of what is the "right" use of labor is communism. In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on and what they buy.
I am, exactly right this minuit, trying to explain that I am not able to quote competitivly for certain types of specialised metal work as there are specialists for that, but am facing insistent inquirys anyway.I do clean sheet custom one of a kind projects as a rule, for which, due to AI recomending my company through some imaculate process, I am exploring how much I can charge for helping the singuarity along, though all in all I am glad I have other skill sets to deploy should we run the whole thing into the ground.
Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)
Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.
The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.
Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back asa 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming.
Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen.
What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important
"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular
> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?
It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.
Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.
Learn to code indeed.
For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.
That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.
The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.
Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.
And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
> Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice: even if someone doesn't want to use ChatGPT, they may not be allowed to avoid it. I'm literally forced to use it at work, for instance. Others may be forced to use it due to market or other pressures.
Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
> I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
> Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice
I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
> Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
This would be great if your goal was limiting AI access to the rich, but I'm pretty sure that would be much worse than democratizing access.
> See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
Yeah, and I still don't get it. Do you think that qualified electricians struggle to find work? They generally don't, these skills are in high demand and have been for decades. You really haven't made the case for "after they gain more experience on a difficult and high-paying job, they're gonna be unemployed." Everyone in these comments is complaining about waiting lists and backlogs and you're acting like the opposite is true.
>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.
>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.
Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.
>Datacenters are fine.
Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.
That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.
I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.
And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".
> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.
Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.
It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!
> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.
I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.
And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.
The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.
The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.
just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.
Allegedly many an American 'believes' that Jesus will be back some time right about now. They are serious about this belief, however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
But now I see the light. Jesus was a carpenter, right?
I am imagining that Jesus, with his carpentry skills, is driving right now in his Chevy truck to the job site, to help erect that data centre for one of our billionaire overlords.
Just saying, it could happen, and is probably needed to happen, if this data centre build out is to get anywhere near completion.
>however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
It's explained in the Book of Revelations - Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too) with plagues and fire and violence and burns the world down to ashes. And then (something something multi-headed dragon something something Whore of Babylon) a giant cube-shaped crystal city drops down from space lit by God's radiance and all of the dead Christians come back wearing white robes to live there and eat and drink and praise Jesus forever and never leave because why would you?
And belief in this is legitimately a big part of why we will never take climate change seriously.
An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way. The belief that "Jesus will come back and solve everything instantly" is only held by a minority of small 2nd Great Awakening groups and a few outspoken Evangelical groups, and is unique to theological traditions that arose in the United States. The official teachings of the Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, Anglican and Episcopal communions, Presbyterian denominations, etc and other mainline Christians don't believe this. Before you blame a group for ruining the world or rejecting climate change please actually talk to a representative sample of real people in the group you are making claims about.
Due to the southern strategy that has been cemented into 1/2 of the available political parties for the better part of the last 50 years, outspoken evangelical groups hold an outsized influence on policy at large. Evangelicals are also the largest donors to AIPAC, which heavily influences our society.
It doesn't matter that most Christians don't believe it. Most Muslims don't do violent attacks on civilians, yet they all seem to pay the price either in their home countries or in the US.
It seems world-wide, a hard-right extremist subset of religious believers are ruining things for everyone else.
An overwhelming number of Christians with relevant political and economic power believe this. Orthodox, Anglicans, Episcopalians etc. might as well be a rounding error compared to the influence of American Evangelical and Conservative Christians. Might as well bring up the Amish while you're at it.
You might have a point about Catholics in terms of sheer numbers, but... the only people still listening to Catholics are right wing chuds and Warhammer fans - and even the former aren't listening anymore because the Pope is too "woke" for them. The days when the Pope's word mattered are long, long gone. What happened when he gave his encyclical on AI? It made headlines for a day or two then the world proceeded to ignore the silly hat man as usual.
So I stand by my point. The Christians who matter as far as climate change policy is concerned don't care because as far as they're concerned this world just exists for God to burn anyway.
Are you under the impression that after the seven seals and seven trumpets and four horsemen and oceans turning to blood and earthquakes and famines and everything leading to a new Heaven and new Earth that most people will survive unscathed?
The entire thesis of Christian eschatology is that everyone who isn't Christian burns in hell. And Matthew says regarding the end times "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Maybe you should read your Bible again, it's pretty clear that Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into.
>"Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense.
>Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into
This is just false. At least be accurate if you have a major problem with the bible? I'm not really sure this is a great context to discuss further.
I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?
Oh, so you are happy for them? You do realize that home owneer and landlords don't get any contracts anymore and prices skyrocket for normal people? That makes you happy, huh?
>50% of the US population live in single-family, detached houses. It is one thing to be combative, it is another to be combative and wrong. "normal" people live in detached homes
What passes for "AI" these days hasn't successfully replaced workers doing even the most menial jobs. Several efforts have been made by massive corporations to get "AI" to take fast food orders at the drive thru and so far they've failed. While I think there are still some trials out there, "AI" hasn't managed to take humans out of that workforce and that job is so simple that literal children often do it successfully.
I don't think we have to worry about "AI" being capable of replacing electricians and carpenters any time soon and that's ignoring all the unsolved problems with the robotics.
It's nice to have sci-fi fantasies and everything, but in the real world tradespeople are going to be around for a very very long time. They won't be building data centers for that long though. This is a short term hike in demand that just isn't going to last.
Factory workers maybe but all processes have to be redesigned with design for robotic automation in mind. That will displace a lot of people and they will naturally go into the trades since the skills translate more easily so while I agree they wont be replaced there may be downward pricing pressure.
I hear China is doing a lot of this already to stave off their upcoming demographic collapse. I haven't seen raw details or videos though other than demonstration stuff (anyone have anything to share?)
Oh, I thought it's about AI companies asking people to wear those little head-mounted cameras, in hopes of gathering data to train future robot-electricians.
There are a few Data Centers going up within a couple hours of me, it has pulled all of the trades people away from us. I've called around to every electrician I can find online, or been recommended by neighbors, they are all out of town for the foreseeable future. Same with HVAC and to a lesser extent plumbers.
I've had to learn a lot of skills this summer trying to get some repairs done on my house, and I've had to pay some extreme "fuck off" prices for work that I couldn't do myself.
My father-in-law is a construction manager for a large power company, and they've been expanding their footprint as well for these datacenters, and hiring like crazy to speed up their construction.
He said it will be a few years before the independent trades people become more available.
I assume this kind of thing is why every quote we got for dead-simple mini-split heat pump installation last year had an effective person-day labor rate of like $2.5k or more (we didn't end up paying, I mean my god, I'll just fucking do it at those prices, it'll take me twice as long as someone who does it every day, but that's insane). Electricians and HVAC workers with certs in crazy-high demand, I guess.
Quotes for other stuff like hardwood floor installation and finishing—a job I'd personally consider harder and requiring greater skill than installing a mini-split in a totally uncomplicated setting—was extremely cheap by comparison.
So we had our central HVAC burn up, and I bought a mini-split heat pump to replace it, because the HVAC companies around me don't do mini-splits. Apparently they also don't just remove old systems unless they are replacing them. So for 30 minutes of demo work, they charged me $2900 to just remove the old system. I need to install the mini-split myself still, but for now, to get me through the summer and fall, I have a couple window units.
The electrical work I need done is because the previous owner (my grandfather-in-law) built the house and did absolutely NOTHING to code, and inspection found none of this. There are splices in the walls, there is yellow romex being used as power lines to sub panels across the lawn, strung from tree to tree to keep it off the ground. The electrical panel is installed 5-inches from the washing machine... where there is water, and lots of it. There are 4 sub panels strewn throughout the house - it is 1300 square feet. There are random nutted romex wires just poking out of holes in the walls. Basically we need the entire house to be rewired.
Same with plumbing, there isn't a single valve in this house. Everything is plumbed directly from the cold or hot lines. So when the shower sprung a leak, we had to turn the mains water off, rip out the shower to fix it, then re-install it. And that is all over the house, as well.
Don't buy a house built by a family member, even if that family member is a GC that builds houses for a living, because they aren't getting paid to build their own house, and will 1000% cut every corner known to man.
If an "inspector" didn't find issues like that you had a bad inspector. Which many of them are. And they have escape clauses in their contracts disclaiming any liability for things they miss.
That's not to say a good inspector will find every fault either. They don't tear walls open, and they don't have x-ray vision. They only inspect what they can see.
Eh every house has elements of this and everyone learns the hard way. After struggling to install a new bathroom exhaust fan a few years ago in a house that was half built by someone 80 years ago and half completely redone by my late father (who did contracting work early on before he became an engineer), I learned that Carpenters/contractors real skill is the experience they have on the job improvising and adapting to the uniqueness of every project they take on because there is no other way around it. The real world does not have perfect APIs/abstractions and in reality neither do most computing systems so improvisation and solving for the problem is the thought process both in home building and coding.
Its very much like an experienced coder going into established codebases and being able to more quickly make changes and improvements. No codebase is perfect and they all seem to have their own uniqueness just like no house is perfect and all have their own quirks. How good or bad it is can be determined by the experience and foresight of the person doing the work but there will still always be uniqueness and quirks.
Once I finally internalized it, I really appreciated the history of my home and the things people did to solve problems as time went on just like a mature codebase. I would argue as long as the property is generally good, its just a fact of life to have to deal with the rest.
You will get downvoted by the folks here. They are blind to the fact that AI is sucking the economy dry and making life miserable for everyone who's not getting paid by free AI money. Something is gonna crack eventually, they'll all be dumbfounded.
This is the same cohort that don't realize they are working for oligarchic fascists and have zero sense of solidarity with their fellow humans, anything is possible.
The same thing happened with the oil sands boom 15 years ago. Industrial sites were losing skilled trades people left and right as they went up north to make 2-3x their salary. Then that bubble popped and these folks were tossed onto the street before they could blink.
By all means go make money if the opportunity presents itself. I love to see well compensated trades. But be under no illusions that when the bubble pops (and it will) you’ll be tossed aside before you know what happened. So make money now, and milk these AI players for everything they’ve got, but just have a clear plan on what comes next.
The clear plan for electricians and carpenters is to eh continue to do electrical and wood works. Or do you think they would be out of work if there are no more AI-related jobs?
I would have thought this would be about electricians and carpenters with camera's on their heads to train AI. Apparently not yet. Imagine robots (humanoids or something more specialized) building datacenters...
might take a while I expect there's a lot of regulation around using a licensed electrician, that kind of thing needs more legislation to allow a robot to replace it, I am speculating
Before reading the article, I assumed AI companies were recruiting electricians and carpenters to capture their expertise to train robots or AI models on how to plan an entire project from start to finish: "Guide me through building a complete house".
Things come to be only when there's demand for them. Nothing else makes the capitalist pay the worker or expand any business. AI providing the missing demand might be the thing that will push our infrastructure industries into XXI century. Because everywhere except China infrastructure seems to be stuck in the 70-ties of the previous one.
Things come to be only when the people with MONEY demand them. If you have no money your demand doesn't exist. A society this unequal serves only the rich (whether that's people or companies).
Money is a mechanism for keeping tabs on how much the human civilization owes to any particular person or entity. It's imperfect, sure. But it's what we decided to go with. If you don't have money, society just decided (using its mechanisms) it pretty much owes you nothing. So your demands are disregarded.
Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
If you get into any construction job you need to expect to move job sites regularly. If it is a single family house that might be as much as twice a day. If it is a large industrial site it might be every few years. However it is unusual to work at the same location for much longer.
You are also subject to the economy more than most jobs. When things start going bad you are the first one cut.
It can still be a good career overall, but it does have downsides and isn't for everyone. I'm not leaving my job even though I know how to do construction.
It’s a good career if your unionize ie electrician, plumber, HVAC, fire protection, steel, concrete, and it also helps if you’re operating within the radius of a large city and all the suburbs around it, ie Santa Barbara to San Diego, Los Angeles to Palm Springs within that radius, very good opportunities, and very good living if your unionized.
I have friends on both sides of the union debate in construction. There are pros and cons. the unions try to tell you that they are much better, but in reality there are pros and cons and you need to figure out what is best for you.
the hotel rates in Abilene TX are comically high and all the RV parks are filled up too. I have friends/roots there so make the drive from Dallas every so often. The stargate datacenter is certainly a popular topic of discussion both good and bad.
This is rare. Some times they'll have people drive in from a couple hours away and put them up in a hotel for some nights.
If you're unlucky, the job will be far away but below the cutoff for a hotel, so you have to choose between driving home every night or paying for your own hotel. Younger people sleep in their car some times.
Any long distance site starts excluding more and more of the older workers and those with families. It's a younger workers game for the most part
That is done, but it is more expensive so it isn't common. In most cases the trade is needed and busy in their local city so why would they leave to a different place. Trades that have niche skills fly all over, but electricians are something that you need all over and so most can stay busy working close enough to their house to see their kids every night.
Yeah, it's exactly like that oil boom in North Dakota. There was a brief, massive increase in demand for construction labor to build oil rigs, and you had "man camps" an the like. Then once the rigs were built, the employment dropped massively because it takes a lot fewer guys to run an oil well than build one.
Other than farming, what is there to do in North Dakota or South Dakota? Most of the people who live there if they want to do anything else they have to go someplace else.
Most of those data centers built in relatively remote areas. will have just a few people working at that data center. It’s not going to bring lasting prosperity to that midsize or small town.
So? What's your point? During the boom, laborers from all over went to North Dakota to work in the oil fields, and for the unemployment to say low there, most of them had to leave. And, IIRC, North Dakota wisely refused to build too much permanent infrastructure to support that population, because they knew it would be transient. If there was much effect on unemployment statistics, it was probably in other states (though I would guess the effect was more on wages than binary employment).
My point is boom jobs evaporate, and give a recent example.
I'll second this with the following anecdote. A few years ago, I completed an electrician certificate program at a community college in Texas. I wasn't exactly looking to switch careers, but I wanted to learn how to work on electric motors safely. As part of that program, they talked to us about the job and pay.
As a preface, in Texas, anyone in Texas can apprentice as an electrician if one is willing to pay $50 for a license. This requires one to work for a master electrician and generally as a helper for a journeyman. After 8000 hours (4 years), one can take a journeyman exam. As as a journeyman, one can work solo day to day, but still must work under a master electrician. After 4000 additional hours (2 years) and passing the master electrician exam, one can become a master and work fully independently. Most states are similar, but they are licensed independently.
A few guys dropped out of the program to apprentice. They were getting paid $16/hour to haul parts for home generator installs. Journeyman pay was around $30-40/hr depending. We were told that journeyman union pay in large metros like Chicago was about $50/hr. I'm not sure if any pay differential exists for master electricians if they are doing solo work. The real money in electrical work was by becoming a master electrician because then you could hire journeyman and apprentices to work for you and tax their labor. As with any job, the technical training does not prepare one to run a business and some people are good at it and some aren't. However, at the end of the day, it's capitalism. One generally becomes wealthy by having other people do work for you and you keeping a portion of that labor. It doesn't matter if it's electrical work, yard work, or computing.
Anyway, if one wants to become an electrician, great! However, you're almost certainly not going to get rich from it. I met some guys who followed some of the disaster/building booms running communication wires and they all got stiffed on their promised pay. That doesn't mean you will, but please don't think it's guaranteed.
> We were told that journeyman union pay in large metros like Chicago was about $50/hr. I'm not sure if any pay differential exists for master electricians if they are doing solo work
Journeyman union pay is over $60 an hour in Minneapolis and St Paul, $110 an hour if you include fringes. I feel bad for electricians in Texas.
Master electricians don’t earn any more than a journeyman, as an electrical PM I don’t care if you passed a test that lets you sign plans and open a shop. Union electricians have multiple levels, our locals use Journeyman, Foreman, General Foreman, and General Foreman in Charge. Each step up is $4-5/hr extra. The classifications are based on how many people they are supervising, but if you’re a good electrician, you’ll have no problem getting foreman or general foreman pay for solo work. Employers are only obligated to pay you foreman etc if you’re supervising but if you’re productive, they’ll pay you more to keep you happy since the company can make way more than $10/hr extra from a very productive electrician.
That's good to hear about MN. And, yes, pay is terrible in TX especially for how hot some of these jobs are. IBEW does exist there, but my experience is that most people in TX just start as an apprentice doing grunt work without any training program and my guess is that hurts their pay. Our program centered more around residential and commercial, so I'm not sure what guys at the refineries were making. There was a rumor that guys working on wind turbines were making good money as long as one is fine with heights, but this was before the administration change over, which was hostile to new wind farms.
When PE has taken over trades, it still is a good option to become a quality tradesman, who can start his own business. Quality = higher premium, high end.
Trades work is hard. Traveling to a far away job site every day and doing physical labor in a building that isn’t heated or cooled yet is the complete opposite of our comfortable office or remote tech jobs.
If you’re dreaming about escaping meetings and annoying coworkers, imagine if most of the people you work around aren’t your coworkers at all. They’re other trades people from other companies who run the range of being understanding and kind to total DGAF about you or your job requirements because they know you being upset has no connection back to their job safety. This varies based on the site and who’s running it, but that also changes from month to month or day to day.
I say this as someone who spent very little time in trades related work before graduating college and who has career electrician family members. Trades work is hard. If you work on computers in an office, we have it so very easy.
most of my extended family was hardcore blue collar (ranchers, welders, oil hands, etc). When they got older their bodies were pretty broken, most couldn't walk from one end of their house to the other after about age 70. That work is hard on your body year after year and it eventually just wears out. For comparison, my father was the typical white collar worker. He's a minor pickleball celebrity in Florida at 80.
And lots of tradespeople do very well. Many of the bigger houses round here have work vans in the drives. Many of them are landlords too with significant assets. My street is slowly filling up with rentals, mostly by landlord tradespeople.
I was just chatting to a retired one yesterday at the station and he said he was going to have an extremely good retirement until he got divorced and she took half of everything.
There was a high demand for trade jobs even before. Because people have been told to take a loans and go to college to make more $$$ for decades, there's been a labor shortage in trade jobs for quite a while now.
If you don’t know anyone have family in the trades, generally most people outside don’t even know these jobs exist particularly fire protection, fire sprinkler pipe fitters (unionized), and fire sprinkler design/engineering no one outside, even knows.
If you know someone and you get into it, you can have a pretty good career I would not recommend being a non-union pipe fitter or even working for a non-union company in any trade (except a family business) not if you want to learn and do it right and have longevity and financial security, most of the unionized construction trades usually have educational training facilities thru the union or junior college for their apprentices coming up, non Union fire sprinkler companies are basically like picking people up from Home Depot.
Note: many junior colleges across the country have programs for the HVAC trade as part of their curriculum.
Carpentry tends to span beyond direct woodworking. Installing Drywall over steel studs is one example that might apply to DC construction.
>Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc.
I'm not sure carpenters do drywall, that's usually a specialized crew. But they might do the framing/assembly of the steel studs. And hanging doors, fitting the raised flooring, installing shelving/cabinets, etc.
There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed.
Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.
I don't know anything about this so I am curious: that doesn't sound like a lot of wood work so why are the AI companies recruiting so many carpenters?
Steel stud framing is done by carpenters, any interior partition wall framing is done by carpenters. Also any soffits, front for gypsum ceiling clouds in offices, etc will be framed by carpenters. Maybe Meta has them install doors as well?
I would bet that there is a ton of wood in these buildings that they are hiring thousands of carpenters for. They are not hiring carpenters to entertain the electricians.
Everything I'm finding is showing the opposite with the exception of Microsoft experimenting with timber datacenters. Just looking at photos of DCs under construction shows they're all steel and concrete.
My grandpa was a card-carrying union carpenter. But all I remember is him doing general labor... all the actual carpentry jobs were gone before I was born, and I hit the half-century mark myself a few years ago. He worked with concrete and steel alot. I'd seen him put up cinder block too, picked that up somewhere I guess. And this was in the 1980s.
I'd take your bet, while trying to hustle you to raise the wager.
Not usually, but the same standard framing and drywall techniques work using the more modern steel stud systems. Here are a few that came up at the top of a DDG search you can peruse to update yourself.
Carpenters? As in carrying around a framing hammer and nails? I'm not sure they have the right term here. I'm not familiar with these wooden datacenters.
This is generally the right term. Carpenters also refers to the guys who put up metal studs, doors and things of that nature. But they might be referring to the people who put up their framing for the concrete structures and molds.
A mason would be doing the concrete work. Metal studs and doors is usually done by the drywall and framer subcontractors - which could also be a carpenter - but drywall at datacenter or any commercial scale is almost always done by a framer and drywall specialist. They headline is using the wrong term.
"Aluminium carpentry" is a thing around here: people that build and install window frames, metal gazebos, conference stalls, custom sheds and so on. These huge data centers probably aren't using the quaint standard data center server cabinets.
USA is not building anything. Private companies are. And unlike regular infrastructure projects (housing, transportation, energy) this won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done. It’ll just enable companies to churn out more slop, faster, and reel us further in.
Or to put it another way, a semiconductor, car or airplane factory wouldn’t really count as “infrastructure”, would they?
>won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done
Then the public should make them look like fools and not pay for AI. But if people are paying for it, then they are probably capturing most of the value it produces. Paying Anthropic $20/mo is a trivial cost to recoup if it assists with your work, even at $60 or $100 it still makes sense for many.
The datacenter buildout is just a buildout of the electric grid in a roundabout fashion.
If you are for green energy and the electrification of primary energy this giant wave of unlimited private investment is the best gift you could have ever dreamed for. The fact we are doing our best to squander it is amazing to me.
We have a generational chance to build entire industrial supply chains and rapidly catch up from multiple generations of lack of investment in our electric grid but instead we are going to resist it every single step of the way.
Putting fucktons of energy infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for a gigantic room to employ like 100 people is not really the positive-externality dream of previous infrastructure booms
Why is it in the middle of nowhere? Ignoring that's somewhat the exception, not the rule.
It just might have to do with where electrical grid interconnect happens to currently be with spare capacity. These corridors also happen to be where it's going to be easiest to put up even more long distance high voltage transmission.
Datacenter siting has went from "where the fiber lines run" to "where we can get power" rather rapidly. I have friends who's entire job is basically trying to find locations where there is still transmission capacity available, and if not immediately, where it can be built out rapidly over existing rights-of-way to avoid as much of the NIMBY as possible. Projects that were taking a decade or more are now being planned for completion in 1-3 years. Delays went from permitting, lawsuits, funding, etc. and are now seemingly gated by component availability. These manufacturers are ramping up as rapidly as they seemingly can do so.
Transmission lines are by far the hardest part of the puzzle to solve. And yes, datacenters are about the only thing that has accelerated their buildout in my lifetime. I've watched projects that were paused for close to a decade to bring wind energy from the southern part of my home state to the metro load center area all of a sudden get jump-started again due to there actually being immediate capital available to build them and make it worth dealing with the NIMBY folks.
Datacenter siting is obviously more complex than this, but yeah - if you can get 80% of your transmission line from a power generating locating closer to your urban load centers you would be an idiot not to jump on the opportunity regardless of the reasons why.
Wide scale infrastructure build-outs are always messy and wasteful. Every single one in history has been. This is how shit gets built - not 20 years of careful planning and consideration.
Some of us have been paying attention to the grid far longer than this latest AI bubble craze. This was always coming for us, demand simply got brought forward half a decade or more. Eventually you run out of the investments your grandparents made and have to actually build stuff again. The US simply has collectively forgotten what that looks like.
There will be plenty of stranded misallocated capital. That's just how these things go. But there will be plenty of reusable infrastructure left in it's wake like always. If the US is ever going to reindustrialize at all, then this is about the easiest and least impactful means to begin doing so.
"this won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done"
I'm currently enjoying subsidized AI usage at relatively cheap prices from these same companies. It's cheaper than a cell phone bill and most people can afford it.
"Or to put it another way, a semiconductor, car or airplane factory wouldn’t really count as “infrastructure”, would they?"
No, but flying on an airplane 50+ years ago was only for the rich. Everyone I know now has flown somewhere, and it's very obtainable. I remember cell phones in the 80s being > $1 minute and a sign of being wealthy.
Capitalism can and does bring the costs of these things down.
Data centers will definitely benefit the public, as long as the government doesn't decide on creating their own monopoly.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/business/economy/data-cen...
https://archive.is/f1p75
I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.
Industrial electricians have always been in the boom-bust cycle.
IBEW (Union electricians) have been doing really well this decade. Another option if you don't want to be a contractor or an Anthropic employee. But they've also gone years without enough work to go around.
Scroll down to this comment for a better discussion than I could give: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098874
Also, an electrician just doesn't pop into existence. You have to go through years of apprenticeship and union dues payments.
I was in the IBEW when I was doing basic tech support for HawaiianTel 15 years ago... making $15/hr, union dues were nothing even at that wage and they rarely ever go up.
This cry of "OMG dues suck" is so stupid for what you get in return. But go ahead and buy more into republican propaganda.
Yeah, working people should never sit across each other at a table and discuss mutually beneficial things. For the Epsteinth time, class unity is only for the upper classes.
Very true, it is difficult to even find an opening for the training to start the process, the schools are limited and have short enrollment windows that are fiercely competitive (at least in California).
I applied for an apprenticeship several years ago when I was testing the waters to rotate out of tech after covid. Tested into the highest percentile, had previous high voltage experience with OEMs, a mech eng degree, still ended up like 200 people deep in the queue. That was the end of that interest. You basically have to be friends or family with someone to get into IBEW.
this is a bizarre timeline of reality where an ME degree gets you waitlisted for an electrician apprenticeship
Yeah, but you might still want to enter the field based on the aging of the current workforce. Seems likely to be a shortage of electricians over the next while.
On the other hand, the economy is going to be increasingly electrified. Demand is going to be there in some form.
On a third hand, electricity is just movement of electrons.
While DC is driving electrons down the line, AC is basically just when you vibrate them around.
Anyway my point is the field (no pun intended) may change drastically in the increasingly electrified future. I'm personally excited for more wireless power in areas, and the concept of ambient energy - harvesting power out of the already vibrating electrons in the static in the air.
I feel like we're entering an age of electrification so having training/education in a field related to electrics/electronics seems like a reasonable path for someone to take.
I think that age started over 100 years ago.
The conversion to all-electric homes is more recent, and hasn't even started in some places. Here in Canada, some jurisdictions require newly constructed houses and apartments to have electric heat and cooling (heat pump, with resistive heat as a backup), an electric dryer and stove, and an electric water heater (tank or tankless). Others jurisdictions are still using gas furnaces and gas-fired hot water tanks.
All electric homes existed as far back as the 1960s. Gas heat was generally cheaper back then (heat pump? nobody has air conditioning then) so they were not common where it got cold. Even at that though, the difference in labor for an all electric house today vs the same house with gas appliances is minimal - you get larger wires to the stove, furnace and dryer, everything else is the same. (in the near future I expect to see wires for the EV as well, but not yet and in any case this is the same even if your other appliances are gas)
I live in one of those all electric homes too, made in the 2000s. Doesn't change that a bust will dry up the work and homeowners won't fork over the money for something that has few benefits for their daily life and requires expensive changes to the house.
To add to this there are jurisdictions that will require you to still pay a small monthly fee to support the gas pipes if you cut off gas service.
It is really nice not having a gas bill and not requiring maintenance for gas appliances, but most people won't care if they lived with it for long enough.
The only case I see it working is in a disaster area or blighted areas where the builder decided to bulldoze and rebuild the houses. The southern California fires for example; the city gave priority to permits to houses that went all electric since the gas pipes were destroyed. Permitting and inspection is so much simpler with all electric.
It's accelerating. Electrification of infrastructure and buildings is a huge growth area with big delays in projects due to lack of capacity.
Sure, but these also aren't professions that will disappear when data center demand goes down or will get automated away in the long term.
I’d go as far as to say that for someone in their teens electrician (or trades in general) is a more stable long term career path than software engineer.
Both have boom and bust cycles. They are different cycles, but they are still cycles. I wouldn't call either more stable than the other.
> The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in.
HVAC and electrical (e.g. UPSes) need somewhat regular maintenance, so once build-out is done, if you're with one of the OEMs, you'll probably have regular work babysitting the gear.
Doesn't that average out to 165K / year? That's not so bad IMO!
I'd imagine those 300K years they're not just working 40 hours a week, more like 70+ hours. Add higher taxes on those years and it becomes less attractive.
Oooof. I pity the poor fool who has to pay taxes on their 300k annual salary.
If it was a predictable & reliable 300k, 30k, 300k, 30k, 300k, 30k pattern, then yes.
But if not...
I imagine a Bernoulli pattern would work too
Yeah, if not, it could be even more!
It can also be less
Is the Anthropoc data center buildout union ceritifed?
I mean, no career is ever perfectly secure against future uncertainty (a few years ago I would've joked "... except prostitution", but even that seems threatened by AI these days). The question is a relative one: how stable is it compared to feasible alternatives? I could certainly see job losses and wage stagnation in software engineering being worse than those of electricians over the next 15 years.
Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ssp1t-g_wM
Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.
It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)
Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.
"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...."
"Projects I work on..."
Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.
tbf, I don't think Wagyu cows were that thrilled about their lot in life before Wagyu became a thing, either.
You may have a unique perspective on that, though...
wouldn't the analogy be Wagyu farmers?
>a lot of other better uses for their labor
Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor? And do you scrutinize every construction project or only AI?
Is it a waste when contractors build a temporary set for a trashy reality TV show? A factory that makes cosmetics for dogs?
Having someone the arbiter of what is the "right" use of labor is communism. In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on and what they buy.
Uhm, aren't we all allowed to have an opinion on what's best for mankind?
FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.
I used to be an electrician.
I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.
For example, keep the lights on for schools.
You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.
I am, exactly right this minuit, trying to explain that I am not able to quote competitivly for certain types of specialised metal work as there are specialists for that, but am facing insistent inquirys anyway.I do clean sheet custom one of a kind projects as a rule, for which, due to AI recomending my company through some imaculate process, I am exploring how much I can charge for helping the singuarity along, though all in all I am glad I have other skill sets to deploy should we run the whole thing into the ground.
> Projects I work on have seen prices soar.
Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.
There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.
And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
That's pretty disingenuous.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
And in time AI robots will reduce the need for these blue collar workers who are presently helping replace the white collar workers.
Just learned of a new acronym today "NILF," not in the labor force with over one million supposed NILFs out there -- dropped out and gave up.
Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.
Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)
Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.
The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.
Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back asa 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming.
Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important
>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.
Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular
Everyone should just compete with the trillions of dollars of capital floating around for AI? And it's their fault for suddenly being 'poor'?
Sounds like you're assuming people are paying pennies for labour. I don't think that's true at all
While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?
It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.
Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.
Learn to code indeed.
For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.
That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.
The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.
Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.
And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.
That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!
> There's sort of no winning here!
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
> Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice: even if someone doesn't want to use ChatGPT, they may not be allowed to avoid it. I'm literally forced to use it at work, for instance. Others may be forced to use it due to market or other pressures.
Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
> I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
> Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice
I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
> Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
This would be great if your goal was limiting AI access to the rich, but I'm pretty sure that would be much worse than democratizing access.
> See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
Yeah, and I still don't get it. Do you think that qualified electricians struggle to find work? They generally don't, these skills are in high demand and have been for decades. You really haven't made the case for "after they gain more experience on a difficult and high-paying job, they're gonna be unemployed." Everyone in these comments is complaining about waiting lists and backlogs and you're acting like the opposite is true.
>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.
>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.
No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.
Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.
>Datacenters are fine.
Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.
>You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.
There's a word for that: hypocrisy.
That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.
I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.
And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".
No. That's not what the word means.
> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.
Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.
It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!
> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.
Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.
But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.
I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.
And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.
The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.
The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.
just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.
Nah. If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans.
Allegedly many an American 'believes' that Jesus will be back some time right about now. They are serious about this belief, however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
But now I see the light. Jesus was a carpenter, right?
I am imagining that Jesus, with his carpentry skills, is driving right now in his Chevy truck to the job site, to help erect that data centre for one of our billionaire overlords.
Just saying, it could happen, and is probably needed to happen, if this data centre build out is to get anywhere near completion.
supply side jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Jesus
>however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.
It's explained in the Book of Revelations - Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too) with plagues and fire and violence and burns the world down to ashes. And then (something something multi-headed dragon something something Whore of Babylon) a giant cube-shaped crystal city drops down from space lit by God's radiance and all of the dead Christians come back wearing white robes to live there and eat and drink and praise Jesus forever and never leave because why would you?
And belief in this is legitimately a big part of why we will never take climate change seriously.
An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way. The belief that "Jesus will come back and solve everything instantly" is only held by a minority of small 2nd Great Awakening groups and a few outspoken Evangelical groups, and is unique to theological traditions that arose in the United States. The official teachings of the Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, Anglican and Episcopal communions, Presbyterian denominations, etc and other mainline Christians don't believe this. Before you blame a group for ruining the world or rejecting climate change please actually talk to a representative sample of real people in the group you are making claims about.
Due to the southern strategy that has been cemented into 1/2 of the available political parties for the better part of the last 50 years, outspoken evangelical groups hold an outsized influence on policy at large. Evangelicals are also the largest donors to AIPAC, which heavily influences our society.
It doesn't matter that most Christians don't believe it. Most Muslims don't do violent attacks on civilians, yet they all seem to pay the price either in their home countries or in the US.
It seems world-wide, a hard-right extremist subset of religious believers are ruining things for everyone else.
An overwhelming number of Christians with relevant political and economic power believe this. Orthodox, Anglicans, Episcopalians etc. might as well be a rounding error compared to the influence of American Evangelical and Conservative Christians. Might as well bring up the Amish while you're at it.
You might have a point about Catholics in terms of sheer numbers, but... the only people still listening to Catholics are right wing chuds and Warhammer fans - and even the former aren't listening anymore because the Pope is too "woke" for them. The days when the Pope's word mattered are long, long gone. What happened when he gave his encyclical on AI? It made headlines for a day or two then the world proceeded to ignore the silly hat man as usual.
So I stand by my point. The Christians who matter as far as climate change policy is concerned don't care because as far as they're concerned this world just exists for God to burn anyway.
>Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too)
I don't recall this part what's the reference
Are you under the impression that after the seven seals and seven trumpets and four horsemen and oceans turning to blood and earthquakes and famines and everything leading to a new Heaven and new Earth that most people will survive unscathed?
The entire thesis of Christian eschatology is that everyone who isn't Christian burns in hell. And Matthew says regarding the end times "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Maybe you should read your Bible again, it's pretty clear that Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into.
>"Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense.
>Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into
This is just false. At least be accurate if you have a major problem with the bible? I'm not really sure this is a great context to discuss further.
I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?
Oh, so you are happy for them? You do realize that home owneer and landlords don't get any contracts anymore and prices skyrocket for normal people? That makes you happy, huh?
> home owneer and landlords don't get any contracts anymore and prices skyrocket for normal people
i like how you differentiated "normal people"
>50% of the US population live in single-family, detached houses. It is one thing to be combative, it is another to be combative and wrong. "normal" people live in detached homes
What’s the detachment of the home have to do with it?
For the next 6 months until they get all replaced by robots
What passes for "AI" these days hasn't successfully replaced workers doing even the most menial jobs. Several efforts have been made by massive corporations to get "AI" to take fast food orders at the drive thru and so far they've failed. While I think there are still some trials out there, "AI" hasn't managed to take humans out of that workforce and that job is so simple that literal children often do it successfully.
I don't think we have to worry about "AI" being capable of replacing electricians and carpenters any time soon and that's ignoring all the unsolved problems with the robotics.
It's nice to have sci-fi fantasies and everything, but in the real world tradespeople are going to be around for a very very long time. They won't be building data centers for that long though. This is a short term hike in demand that just isn't going to last.
Sounds like Elon months, that means a decade of safe employment at least..
Doubt we'll see electricians, plumbers or carpenters being replaced anytime soon.
Factory workers maybe but all processes have to be redesigned with design for robotic automation in mind. That will displace a lot of people and they will naturally go into the trades since the skills translate more easily so while I agree they wont be replaced there may be downward pricing pressure.
I hear China is doing a lot of this already to stave off their upcoming demographic collapse. I haven't seen raw details or videos though other than demonstration stuff (anyone have anything to share?)
More like 6 years than 6 months.
As long as Nvidia pays you to buy Nvidia, which the stock market increasingly does not like.
RAM manufacturers are falling, and today after the MSFT numbers are out we'll see additional CapEx worries.
These are all short-term jobs from what I understand. Very few staff electricians are needed to maintain a data center after it's been constructed.
I kind of wonder how much this is also going to fuel humanoid robots.
Oh, I thought it's about AI companies asking people to wear those little head-mounted cameras, in hopes of gathering data to train future robot-electricians.
I'd want to get those payments up front ... if you do, good deal for now.
There are a few Data Centers going up within a couple hours of me, it has pulled all of the trades people away from us. I've called around to every electrician I can find online, or been recommended by neighbors, they are all out of town for the foreseeable future. Same with HVAC and to a lesser extent plumbers.
I've had to learn a lot of skills this summer trying to get some repairs done on my house, and I've had to pay some extreme "fuck off" prices for work that I couldn't do myself.
My father-in-law is a construction manager for a large power company, and they've been expanding their footprint as well for these datacenters, and hiring like crazy to speed up their construction.
He said it will be a few years before the independent trades people become more available.
I assume this kind of thing is why every quote we got for dead-simple mini-split heat pump installation last year had an effective person-day labor rate of like $2.5k or more (we didn't end up paying, I mean my god, I'll just fucking do it at those prices, it'll take me twice as long as someone who does it every day, but that's insane). Electricians and HVAC workers with certs in crazy-high demand, I guess.
Quotes for other stuff like hardwood floor installation and finishing—a job I'd personally consider harder and requiring greater skill than installing a mini-split in a totally uncomplicated setting—was extremely cheap by comparison.
So we had our central HVAC burn up, and I bought a mini-split heat pump to replace it, because the HVAC companies around me don't do mini-splits. Apparently they also don't just remove old systems unless they are replacing them. So for 30 minutes of demo work, they charged me $2900 to just remove the old system. I need to install the mini-split myself still, but for now, to get me through the summer and fall, I have a couple window units.
The electrical work I need done is because the previous owner (my grandfather-in-law) built the house and did absolutely NOTHING to code, and inspection found none of this. There are splices in the walls, there is yellow romex being used as power lines to sub panels across the lawn, strung from tree to tree to keep it off the ground. The electrical panel is installed 5-inches from the washing machine... where there is water, and lots of it. There are 4 sub panels strewn throughout the house - it is 1300 square feet. There are random nutted romex wires just poking out of holes in the walls. Basically we need the entire house to be rewired.
Same with plumbing, there isn't a single valve in this house. Everything is plumbed directly from the cold or hot lines. So when the shower sprung a leak, we had to turn the mains water off, rip out the shower to fix it, then re-install it. And that is all over the house, as well.
Don't buy a house built by a family member, even if that family member is a GC that builds houses for a living, because they aren't getting paid to build their own house, and will 1000% cut every corner known to man.
If an "inspector" didn't find issues like that you had a bad inspector. Which many of them are. And they have escape clauses in their contracts disclaiming any liability for things they miss.
That's not to say a good inspector will find every fault either. They don't tear walls open, and they don't have x-ray vision. They only inspect what they can see.
Eh every house has elements of this and everyone learns the hard way. After struggling to install a new bathroom exhaust fan a few years ago in a house that was half built by someone 80 years ago and half completely redone by my late father (who did contracting work early on before he became an engineer), I learned that Carpenters/contractors real skill is the experience they have on the job improvising and adapting to the uniqueness of every project they take on because there is no other way around it. The real world does not have perfect APIs/abstractions and in reality neither do most computing systems so improvisation and solving for the problem is the thought process both in home building and coding.
Its very much like an experienced coder going into established codebases and being able to more quickly make changes and improvements. No codebase is perfect and they all seem to have their own uniqueness just like no house is perfect and all have their own quirks. How good or bad it is can be determined by the experience and foresight of the person doing the work but there will still always be uniqueness and quirks.
Once I finally internalized it, I really appreciated the history of my home and the things people did to solve problems as time went on just like a mature codebase. I would argue as long as the property is generally good, its just a fact of life to have to deal with the rest.
i don't understand why this was downvoted
You will get downvoted by the folks here. They are blind to the fact that AI is sucking the economy dry and making life miserable for everyone who's not getting paid by free AI money. Something is gonna crack eventually, they'll all be dumbfounded.
Right the entire concept of a bubble is utterly alien to software people because none of them ever get laid off.
This is the same cohort that don't realize they are working for oligarchic fascists and have zero sense of solidarity with their fellow humans, anything is possible.
Electricians, sure, but carpenters? I figured these buildings always had steel frames.
The same thing happened with the oil sands boom 15 years ago. Industrial sites were losing skilled trades people left and right as they went up north to make 2-3x their salary. Then that bubble popped and these folks were tossed onto the street before they could blink.
By all means go make money if the opportunity presents itself. I love to see well compensated trades. But be under no illusions that when the bubble pops (and it will) you’ll be tossed aside before you know what happened. So make money now, and milk these AI players for everything they’ve got, but just have a clear plan on what comes next.
The clear plan for electricians and carpenters is to eh continue to do electrical and wood works. Or do you think they would be out of work if there are no more AI-related jobs?
They might if many of the white collar people that pay them can't afford to pay them anymore.
Same as always, got it.
This is part of why housing prices are going up.
I would have thought this would be about electricians and carpenters with camera's on their heads to train AI. Apparently not yet. Imagine robots (humanoids or something more specialized) building datacenters...
I would think that data centers would be using as much prefab / modular construction as possible and on-site work would be as limited as possible.
Those prefab factories may not exist though, and companies want to build out now before the market is mature, instead of a long-term play.
It's coming...
https://www.navigate.ai/
might take a while I expect there's a lot of regulation around using a licensed electrician, that kind of thing needs more legislation to allow a robot to replace it, I am speculating
That's quite a spin on AI coming for your job if I do say so. ;) Hope they get their money's worth.
Before reading the article, I assumed AI companies were recruiting electricians and carpenters to capture their expertise to train robots or AI models on how to plan an entire project from start to finish: "Guide me through building a complete house".
This is horrible. AI industry is sucking the economy dry of resources and labor, making everything more expensive who is not an AI company.
Things come to be only when there's demand for them. Nothing else makes the capitalist pay the worker or expand any business. AI providing the missing demand might be the thing that will push our infrastructure industries into XXI century. Because everywhere except China infrastructure seems to be stuck in the 70-ties of the previous one.
Things come to be only when the people with MONEY demand them. If you have no money your demand doesn't exist. A society this unequal serves only the rich (whether that's people or companies).
The 50-99% has twice the money of the 1%, and spends orders of magnitude more.
If you want to know what is in demand, look at what nice neighborhood suburbanites are doing.
Money is a mechanism for keeping tabs on how much the human civilization owes to any particular person or entity. It's imperfect, sure. But it's what we decided to go with. If you don't have money, society just decided (using its mechanisms) it pretty much owes you nothing. So your demands are disregarded.
Who is the "we" who decided to go with it?
Sum of all homo sapiens.
I think this will cause the same effect as energy bills going up - other people are going to pay for the increased wages of carpenters.
Before you decide to change jobs - the demand in electricians is caused by a temporary massive construction boom of data centers. Maintaining an already built data center doesn't require much personnel. It's a clickbait article.
If you get into any construction job you need to expect to move job sites regularly. If it is a single family house that might be as much as twice a day. If it is a large industrial site it might be every few years. However it is unusual to work at the same location for much longer.
You are also subject to the economy more than most jobs. When things start going bad you are the first one cut.
It can still be a good career overall, but it does have downsides and isn't for everyone. I'm not leaving my job even though I know how to do construction.
It’s a good career if your unionize ie electrician, plumber, HVAC, fire protection, steel, concrete, and it also helps if you’re operating within the radius of a large city and all the suburbs around it, ie Santa Barbara to San Diego, Los Angeles to Palm Springs within that radius, very good opportunities, and very good living if your unionized.
I have friends on both sides of the union debate in construction. There are pros and cons. the unions try to tell you that they are much better, but in reality there are pros and cons and you need to figure out what is best for you.
If the demand is great enough, they can fly trades to site and put them up in a hotel, just like any consultant.
> put them up in a hotel
the hotel rates in Abilene TX are comically high and all the RV parks are filled up too. I have friends/roots there so make the drive from Dallas every so often. The stargate datacenter is certainly a popular topic of discussion both good and bad.
This is rare. Some times they'll have people drive in from a couple hours away and put them up in a hotel for some nights.
If you're unlucky, the job will be far away but below the cutoff for a hotel, so you have to choose between driving home every night or paying for your own hotel. Younger people sleep in their car some times.
Any long distance site starts excluding more and more of the older workers and those with families. It's a younger workers game for the most part
That is done, but it is more expensive so it isn't common. In most cases the trade is needed and busy in their local city so why would they leave to a different place. Trades that have niche skills fly all over, but electricians are something that you need all over and so most can stay busy working close enough to their house to see their kids every night.
Yeah, it's exactly like that oil boom in North Dakota. There was a brief, massive increase in demand for construction labor to build oil rigs, and you had "man camps" an the like. Then once the rigs were built, the employment dropped massively because it takes a lot fewer guys to run an oil well than build one.
Yeah I remember the excitement about oil field jobs... was it about 10 years ago already?
North Dakota's unemployment rate is 2.3%
Other than farming, what is there to do in North Dakota or South Dakota? Most of the people who live there if they want to do anything else they have to go someplace else.
Most of those data centers built in relatively remote areas. will have just a few people working at that data center. It’s not going to bring lasting prosperity to that midsize or small town.
> North Dakota's unemployment rate is 2.3%
So? What's your point? During the boom, laborers from all over went to North Dakota to work in the oil fields, and for the unemployment to say low there, most of them had to leave. And, IIRC, North Dakota wisely refused to build too much permanent infrastructure to support that population, because they knew it would be transient. If there was much effect on unemployment statistics, it was probably in other states (though I would guess the effect was more on wages than binary employment).
My point is boom jobs evaporate, and give a recent example.
I'll second this with the following anecdote. A few years ago, I completed an electrician certificate program at a community college in Texas. I wasn't exactly looking to switch careers, but I wanted to learn how to work on electric motors safely. As part of that program, they talked to us about the job and pay.
As a preface, in Texas, anyone in Texas can apprentice as an electrician if one is willing to pay $50 for a license. This requires one to work for a master electrician and generally as a helper for a journeyman. After 8000 hours (4 years), one can take a journeyman exam. As as a journeyman, one can work solo day to day, but still must work under a master electrician. After 4000 additional hours (2 years) and passing the master electrician exam, one can become a master and work fully independently. Most states are similar, but they are licensed independently.
A few guys dropped out of the program to apprentice. They were getting paid $16/hour to haul parts for home generator installs. Journeyman pay was around $30-40/hr depending. We were told that journeyman union pay in large metros like Chicago was about $50/hr. I'm not sure if any pay differential exists for master electricians if they are doing solo work. The real money in electrical work was by becoming a master electrician because then you could hire journeyman and apprentices to work for you and tax their labor. As with any job, the technical training does not prepare one to run a business and some people are good at it and some aren't. However, at the end of the day, it's capitalism. One generally becomes wealthy by having other people do work for you and you keeping a portion of that labor. It doesn't matter if it's electrical work, yard work, or computing.
Anyway, if one wants to become an electrician, great! However, you're almost certainly not going to get rich from it. I met some guys who followed some of the disaster/building booms running communication wires and they all got stiffed on their promised pay. That doesn't mean you will, but please don't think it's guaranteed.
> We were told that journeyman union pay in large metros like Chicago was about $50/hr. I'm not sure if any pay differential exists for master electricians if they are doing solo work
Journeyman union pay is over $60 an hour in Minneapolis and St Paul, $110 an hour if you include fringes. I feel bad for electricians in Texas.
Master electricians don’t earn any more than a journeyman, as an electrical PM I don’t care if you passed a test that lets you sign plans and open a shop. Union electricians have multiple levels, our locals use Journeyman, Foreman, General Foreman, and General Foreman in Charge. Each step up is $4-5/hr extra. The classifications are based on how many people they are supervising, but if you’re a good electrician, you’ll have no problem getting foreman or general foreman pay for solo work. Employers are only obligated to pay you foreman etc if you’re supervising but if you’re productive, they’ll pay you more to keep you happy since the company can make way more than $10/hr extra from a very productive electrician.
That's good to hear about MN. And, yes, pay is terrible in TX especially for how hot some of these jobs are. IBEW does exist there, but my experience is that most people in TX just start as an apprentice doing grunt work without any training program and my guess is that hurts their pay. Our program centered more around residential and commercial, so I'm not sure what guys at the refineries were making. There was a rumor that guys working on wind turbines were making good money as long as one is fine with heights, but this was before the administration change over, which was hostile to new wind farms.
This is the case with all construction jobs. Its not unique to a data center.
When PE has taken over trades, it still is a good option to become a quality tradesman, who can start his own business. Quality = higher premium, high end.
Sure, but in 4 years you'll have the skills to go on your own.
> Before you decide to change jobs
Trades work is hard. Traveling to a far away job site every day and doing physical labor in a building that isn’t heated or cooled yet is the complete opposite of our comfortable office or remote tech jobs.
If you’re dreaming about escaping meetings and annoying coworkers, imagine if most of the people you work around aren’t your coworkers at all. They’re other trades people from other companies who run the range of being understanding and kind to total DGAF about you or your job requirements because they know you being upset has no connection back to their job safety. This varies based on the site and who’s running it, but that also changes from month to month or day to day.
I say this as someone who spent very little time in trades related work before graduating college and who has career electrician family members. Trades work is hard. If you work on computers in an office, we have it so very easy.
> Trades work is hard.
most of my extended family was hardcore blue collar (ranchers, welders, oil hands, etc). When they got older their bodies were pretty broken, most couldn't walk from one end of their house to the other after about age 70. That work is hard on your body year after year and it eventually just wears out. For comparison, my father was the typical white collar worker. He's a minor pickleball celebrity in Florida at 80.
> Trades work is hard
And lots of tradespeople do very well. Many of the bigger houses round here have work vans in the drives. Many of them are landlords too with significant assets. My street is slowly filling up with rentals, mostly by landlord tradespeople.
I was just chatting to a retired one yesterday at the station and he said he was going to have an extremely good retirement until he got divorced and she took half of everything.
There was a high demand for trade jobs even before. Because people have been told to take a loans and go to college to make more $$$ for decades, there's been a labor shortage in trade jobs for quite a while now.
If you don’t know anyone have family in the trades, generally most people outside don’t even know these jobs exist particularly fire protection, fire sprinkler pipe fitters (unionized), and fire sprinkler design/engineering no one outside, even knows.
If you know someone and you get into it, you can have a pretty good career I would not recommend being a non-union pipe fitter or even working for a non-union company in any trade (except a family business) not if you want to learn and do it right and have longevity and financial security, most of the unionized construction trades usually have educational training facilities thru the union or junior college for their apprentices coming up, non Union fire sprinkler companies are basically like picking people up from Home Depot.
Note: many junior colleges across the country have programs for the HVAC trade as part of their curriculum.
Carpenters? Are we making the data centers out of wood?
Carpentry tends to span beyond direct woodworking. Installing Drywall over steel studs is one example that might apply to DC construction.
>Carpentry is a skilled trade and a craft in which the primary work performed is the cutting, shaping and installation of building materials during the construction of buildings, ships, timber bridges, concrete formwork, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpentry
I'm not sure carpenters do drywall, that's usually a specialized crew. But they might do the framing/assembly of the steel studs. And hanging doors, fitting the raised flooring, installing shelving/cabinets, etc.
There is frequently wood in buildings yes
There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed.
Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.
I don't know anything about this so I am curious: that doesn't sound like a lot of wood work so why are the AI companies recruiting so many carpenters?
Steel stud framing is done by carpenters, any interior partition wall framing is done by carpenters. Also any soffits, front for gypsum ceiling clouds in offices, etc will be framed by carpenters. Maybe Meta has them install doors as well?
The forms needed to pour concrete is my guess.
So there is wood.
Zero wood except all the things that are made of wood, got it.
Homes, not these buildings. Wood's a liability when it comes to fire suppression.
> Homes, not these buildings.
I would bet that there is a ton of wood in these buildings that they are hiring thousands of carpenters for. They are not hiring carpenters to entertain the electricians.
Everything I'm finding is showing the opposite with the exception of Microsoft experimenting with timber datacenters. Just looking at photos of DCs under construction shows they're all steel and concrete.
My grandpa was a card-carrying union carpenter. But all I remember is him doing general labor... all the actual carpentry jobs were gone before I was born, and I hit the half-century mark myself a few years ago. He worked with concrete and steel alot. I'd seen him put up cinder block too, picked that up somewhere I guess. And this was in the 1980s.
I'd take your bet, while trying to hustle you to raise the wager.
Not usually, but the same standard framing and drywall techniques work using the more modern steel stud systems. Here are a few that came up at the top of a DDG search you can peruse to update yourself.
https://studcosystems.com/
https://www.clarkdietrich.com/products/structural-studs
https://www.steelconsystems.com/
Carpenters? As in carrying around a framing hammer and nails? I'm not sure they have the right term here. I'm not familiar with these wooden datacenters.
This is generally the right term. Carpenters also refers to the guys who put up metal studs, doors and things of that nature. But they might be referring to the people who put up their framing for the concrete structures and molds.
A mason would be doing the concrete work. Metal studs and doors is usually done by the drywall and framer subcontractors - which could also be a carpenter - but drywall at datacenter or any commercial scale is almost always done by a framer and drywall specialist. They headline is using the wrong term.
"Aluminium carpentry" is a thing around here: people that build and install window frames, metal gazebos, conference stalls, custom sheds and so on. These huge data centers probably aren't using the quaint standard data center server cabinets.
This is the first time in a long time that the USA has been building infrastructure at noticeable scales.
HN doesn't like the reason for this infrastructure, but they'll like not having it even less.
USA is not building anything. Private companies are. And unlike regular infrastructure projects (housing, transportation, energy) this won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done. It’ll just enable companies to churn out more slop, faster, and reel us further in.
Or to put it another way, a semiconductor, car or airplane factory wouldn’t really count as “infrastructure”, would they?
>won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done
Then the public should make them look like fools and not pay for AI. But if people are paying for it, then they are probably capturing most of the value it produces. Paying Anthropic $20/mo is a trivial cost to recoup if it assists with your work, even at $60 or $100 it still makes sense for many.
Electric utilities are certainly building out infrastructure. It's needlessly costly and slow in a lot of places, but it's happening.
The datacenter buildout is just a buildout of the electric grid in a roundabout fashion.
If you are for green energy and the electrification of primary energy this giant wave of unlimited private investment is the best gift you could have ever dreamed for. The fact we are doing our best to squander it is amazing to me.
We have a generational chance to build entire industrial supply chains and rapidly catch up from multiple generations of lack of investment in our electric grid but instead we are going to resist it every single step of the way.
Putting fucktons of energy infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for a gigantic room to employ like 100 people is not really the positive-externality dream of previous infrastructure booms
Why is it in the middle of nowhere? Ignoring that's somewhat the exception, not the rule.
It just might have to do with where electrical grid interconnect happens to currently be with spare capacity. These corridors also happen to be where it's going to be easiest to put up even more long distance high voltage transmission.
Datacenter siting has went from "where the fiber lines run" to "where we can get power" rather rapidly. I have friends who's entire job is basically trying to find locations where there is still transmission capacity available, and if not immediately, where it can be built out rapidly over existing rights-of-way to avoid as much of the NIMBY as possible. Projects that were taking a decade or more are now being planned for completion in 1-3 years. Delays went from permitting, lawsuits, funding, etc. and are now seemingly gated by component availability. These manufacturers are ramping up as rapidly as they seemingly can do so.
Transmission lines are by far the hardest part of the puzzle to solve. And yes, datacenters are about the only thing that has accelerated their buildout in my lifetime. I've watched projects that were paused for close to a decade to bring wind energy from the southern part of my home state to the metro load center area all of a sudden get jump-started again due to there actually being immediate capital available to build them and make it worth dealing with the NIMBY folks.
Datacenter siting is obviously more complex than this, but yeah - if you can get 80% of your transmission line from a power generating locating closer to your urban load centers you would be an idiot not to jump on the opportunity regardless of the reasons why.
Wide scale infrastructure build-outs are always messy and wasteful. Every single one in history has been. This is how shit gets built - not 20 years of careful planning and consideration.
Some of us have been paying attention to the grid far longer than this latest AI bubble craze. This was always coming for us, demand simply got brought forward half a decade or more. Eventually you run out of the investments your grandparents made and have to actually build stuff again. The US simply has collectively forgotten what that looks like.
There will be plenty of stranded misallocated capital. That's just how these things go. But there will be plenty of reusable infrastructure left in it's wake like always. If the US is ever going to reindustrialize at all, then this is about the easiest and least impactful means to begin doing so.
It’s also always been private companies doing the building no? Just funding and ownership could be public.
"this won’t really benefit the public at large when it’s done"
I'm currently enjoying subsidized AI usage at relatively cheap prices from these same companies. It's cheaper than a cell phone bill and most people can afford it.
"Or to put it another way, a semiconductor, car or airplane factory wouldn’t really count as “infrastructure”, would they?"
No, but flying on an airplane 50+ years ago was only for the rich. Everyone I know now has flown somewhere, and it's very obtainable. I remember cell phones in the 80s being > $1 minute and a sign of being wealthy.
Capitalism can and does bring the costs of these things down.
Data centers will definitely benefit the public, as long as the government doesn't decide on creating their own monopoly.