As Big Tech dumps billions of dollars into America’s data center buildout, a slew of opportunities have opened up to the electricians wiring these massive facilities.
In some cases, the scale of the projects and the demanding construction timelines are fueling talent wars for the industry’s best and brightest. The US-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has argued that its workers are “powering the AI Revolution,” and a set of “Data Center Principles” published in March argues that union labor is “essential to the future of AI.” Tech companies are trying to meet the moment: Meta recently announced a skilled trade academy program, and Google committed $50 million to help train people in skilled trades.
But amid growing national opposition to data centers, debates over the ethics of the massive buildout have started to pop up in some online pockets of the community.
Threads about how AI will affect the economy now pepper r/electricians, a subreddit with around half a million monthly visitors. Some users wonder whether the work will eventually prompt widespread job losses. Others aren’t sure if their labor makes them complicit in the damage done to local communities or whether it’s unethical to take on data center work. For some, the answer is a firm no. Ultimately, they argue, work is work.
One electrician based in the Midwest says he no longer tells people what he does for a living.
As a “single guy attempting to date,” he tells WIRED, “the conversation shifts or gets shut down altogether” when he reveals his line of work. He recalls a handful of instances in which people told him “how terrible it is that you’re contributing to something like that.”
“That's usually the last time you hear from them,” he says. (The electrician, like others who spoke to WIRED, requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak to reporters.)
He has some worries, mostly around the proliferation of scams and how “corporate greed” could spell doom for workers. But he also specifically sought out work at a data center and was willing to take a pay cut to get in the door. He saw a unique opportunity for upward mobility—though he was hired as an electrician, he was promoted to a management role within months. He hopes to eventually transition into an engineering role.
“I did just see it as, ‘Well, this is most likely going to be a major part of our future. And if you can't beat them, join them,” he says.
An electrician named Ryan, meanwhile, says that he’s never worked at a data center and probably never will. “I think world governments, not just our own, are becoming more right-wing and more fascistic,” he tells WIRED. He doesn’t trust corporations operating within this context and believes executives like Elon Musk and Alex Karp are all “suspicious at best.”
If AI were destined for benevolent use, Ryan believes, things would be different. But he thinks the reality looks more like “four or five AI companies just exchanging money with each other in a circle.” He’s also concerned about the AI bubble.
As an IBEW worker, Ryan has some agency over his work—he can say yes or no to a job that the union offers. Ryan says his branch occasionally serves up small jobs for local data centers, which he has found easy to avoid. Even if he were out of work for a long time, he would still find it “really tough to want to take that job call.” (He would also say no to other jobs he deems unethical, like ones at private prisons.)
Still, he says, “if they're going to get built, I'd rather they go union.”
Jesse, an IBEW electrician, tells WIRED that he has concerns about community pushback to data centers.
“I think it's ridiculous if, to build a data center or any kind of a business, you're going to significantly impact the lives of that community in a negative way,” Jesse says. But he believes those issues should be addressed by contacting state and local governments, not by begrudging electricians who need the work.
The sentiment is common. The forces behind the data center buildout are much bigger than one individual person, so why should an individual be judged for working on one?
An electrician named Dante tells WIRED that he has worked on data centers operated by Intel, HP, and Amazon. “Nobody judges me” for data center work, he says, because “we're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck because of the unlivable world that those same rich people have created for us.”
“Either I'm wiring up a lumber mill or a Dollar General warehouse or a data center or an Amazon facility or whatever else,” Dante says. It’s “essentially the same kind of work—all for already extremely rich pieces of shit to use for the exploitation of the working class so they can get more rich.”
For others, that rationalization doesn’t cut it.
One electrician tells WIRED that job scarcity can fuel an attitude that since workers “have to put food on the table,” they should be immune to criticism. Pushing back against this mindset, they say, “would not end well at a union hall.” But privately, they take issue with it.
“If work is tight and a company comes in and wants to build orphan-crushing machines (or some other diabolical contrivance), you'll get a lot of shrugged shoulders, grim faces, and ‘I hope they pay double for overtime,’” the electrician says. “It's an attitude I hate.”
“I've participated in some professional development groups where different degrees of compartmentalization are deployed to justify the work, usually landing on ‘It's going to be built no matter what, I might as well get paid,’” an apprentice tells WIRED. They believe that for some people, a paycheck will always justify the work they do for it, “regardless of what the project is.”
“But of course that's easy for me to say,” the apprentice adds, “because my livelihood doesn't depend on them.”
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