That doesn’t mean your specific local market won’t be cyclical though. As usual the electricians in higher densities metros will probably do better with aggregate demand.

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.

This cry of "OMG dues suck" is so stupid for what you get in return. But go ahead and buy more into republican propaganda.

But if not...

This was being talked about more in 2025 than it is now. Nobody seems to have deployed a 1MW rack yet. There are major problems to be solved for that level of power density. The fire protection people want racks in fireproof enclosures with a built in inert gas extinguishing system and smoke detectors that pull in air from many points for very fast detection. The cooling people talk about 400 gallons per minute of chilled glycol. The power people talk about arc flash protection and worker safety.

This is a scary level of energy density. Not hopeless; the switchgear and semiconductor inside locomotives are at comparable levels.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

[2] https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2025/10/16/the-1-mw-ai-it-rac...

[3] https://flex.com/resources/megawatt-racks-are-coming-how-800...

It works like a nuclear power plant cooling system if you want to look an a diagram that is easily available. The radiated core water loop is equivalent to the rack water loop and the cooling water piping is equivalent to the chilled water loop, the difference being that data centers recirculate their chilled water loop water while nuclear plants generally discharge the water after it has passed through cooling towers.

"Projects I work on..."

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.

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.

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!

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Jesus

i like how you differentiated "normal people"

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.

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.

Amazon has hired so many journeymen electricians from our area that apprenticeship waiting lists have exploded. If you can assume that happens where the demand is being bought up, jobs could fail to emerge even if wages go up for existing experts.

In any case, the externalities like power and water draw or pollution rain down on the locals permanently, even if trades enjoyed a brief period of demand. It's not like a city emerging. It's a big warehouse that's pretty sparsely employed relative to its size.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This doesn't always work, but the idea is in the long term it works better than the alternatives.

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.

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.

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.