Northern Virginia’s energy-hungry data center juggernaut shoulders roughly 70% of the world’s internet traffic. Behind that buildout is an army of blue-collar electrical workers.
“Forty-five to 70% of construction of a data center is electrical,” said Joe Dabbs, the former business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26, the union representing 12,500 electricians in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. “The teledata portion, the fiber optic portion, the power and power distribution … all the gear work — that’s us. We build all of that stuff.”
Electricians are also needed for maintenance and changing out equipment, Dabbs said, meaning the local union has “people in data centers around the clock, 24/7.”
And the demand for workers keeps rolling in — making it a good time to be an electrician in America, where experienced workers can earn over six figures.
The race to build data centers — the infrastructure that makes cloud storage, streaming, and high-frequency trading possible — has only sped up in the AI age, with global demand for data center capacity potentially almost tripling by 2030. That’s expected to turbocharge both electricity consumption and the need for skilled electricians, with the US seeing an average of about 81,000 job openings for electricians annually over the next decade.
Tech giants have also highlighted their reliance on skilled tradespeople for AI-related infrastructure projects. Google noted in a May paper that the country’s shortage of electrical workers could “constrain America’s ability to build the infrastructure needed to support AI, advanced manufacturing, and a shift to clean-energy.”
So Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm, announced $10 million in grant funding for the Electrical Training Alliance — a joint training program of the National Electrical Contractors Association and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — to train 100,000 electricians and 30,000 new apprentices.
“We really believe that the US has an opportunity for a new era of innovation and growth, especially with the application of AI,” said Maab Ibrahim, head of economic opportunity for the Americas at Google.org. “It will require a lot of physical infrastructure upgrades, energy, and a skilled workforce that will build and maintain it.”
Microsoft President Brad Smith also said in an opinion piece for Fox Business earlier this year that while the tech behemoth has hired thousands of electricians to build out data center infrastructure, some workers still had to commute far distances or temporarily relocate to meet the need. He believed the US may need half a million new electricians in the next decade.
