A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands
The future of artificial intelligence depends on finding more skilled humans for some very physical jobs.
There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functionally unlimited cash that are racing to supply skyrocketing demand for their A.I. models.
Developers are paying a premium for workers, especially in the rural areas where they are building data centers. According to an analysis by Indeed, the job listings website, hourly installation and maintenance jobs at data centers pay 42 percent more than similar jobs in other fields.
Joe Ottenbacher already switched careers, leaving early childhood education because of its bureaucracy and underfunding. He worries that an exodus of electricians from their $200,000-a-year data center jobs could depress wages for everybody else.
“If we have an influx of workers at this point with the data centers being built, what happens when they’re done? Where do those workers go?” he said. “How many people does it take to run a data center after taking up all this property and all this land that could have been used for something else?”