A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

edot

Carpenters? Are we making the data centers out of wood?

xur17

https://archive.is/f1p75

cynicalsecurity

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.

jermaustin1

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.

kristov

It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)

ragebol

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...

emsign

This is horrible. AI industry is sucking the economy dry of resources and labor, making everything more expensive who is not an AI company.

cmiles8

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.

eddyg

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/business/economy/data-cen...

giancarlostoro

That's quite a spin on AI coming for your job if I do say so. ;) Hope they get their money's worth.

Zsfe510asG

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.

giardini

This is part of why housing prices are going up.

simianwords

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.

1970-01-01

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.

kvisner

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.

duxup

I'd want to get those payments up front ... if you do, good deal for now.

wslh

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".

gattr

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.

jelder

Electricians, sure, but carpenters? I figured these buildings always had steel frames.

Animats

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