Google Funding Electrician Training As AI Power Crunch Intensifies 31
Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has led President Donald Trump to declare a national energy emergency aimed at speeding up permitting for generation and transmission projects.
Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.
Google's funding, which includes a $10 million grant for electrical worker nonprofits, is the latest in a series of recent moves by giant technology companies to alleviate power project backlogs and electricity shortfalls across the United States. [...] The Google grant will be used for electrician apprenticeship programs and the training of existing workforce through organizations, including the Electrical Training Alliance, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association. It could increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade, the company said. "This initiative with Google and our partners at NECA and the Electrical Training Alliance will bring more than 100,000 sorely needed electricians into the trade to meet the demands of an AI-driven surge in data centers and power generation," said Kenneth Cooper, international president of the IBEW labor union.
weird article (Score:5, Insightful)
How much per tranee will $10 million get? $100.
I'm guessing non-college electrician training costs at least $10,000 so google is funding 1% of that cost with this grant. Very generous.
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Yep. Pays for 2 hours of training or so? Real electrician training takes a bit longer...
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$100 might be enough for someone to walk them through the application process for a paid apprenticeship. Or $50 for that, and $50 for enough booze to get them interested.
Re:weird article (Score:4, Interesting)
How much per tranee will $10 million get? $100.
I'm guessing non-college electrician training costs at least $10,000 so google is funding 1% of that cost with this grant. Very generous.
Obviously they're not paying for training but funding expanded access to training. Establishment of new training programs, outreach to underserved candidate populations, etc. Generally, grants of this sort attract matching money from government and other private individuals, too. It's seed money, not subsidized tuition.
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Remember When? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when a person would exit high school, and companies like GM, Ford, Pratt & Whitney and such would get these kids, train them up, turn them into machinists, welders, electricians and more, and then built things.
One could even concievably work at that one company your entire career, and retire with pension.
Yeah. I remember. I was little at the tail end of that era. Do any of you remember?
This sounds like a return to that, but.. I'm sure it's all for show and virtue-signalling.
"Authenticity" died sometime in the past 30 years.
We need to get back to this kind of thing. You want skilled labor to make things? Train them up yourselves. It's how it was done, and we won wars and went to the moon like that.
Now we just moan and whine on social media.
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Obviously you're using hyperbole here, but you're not wrong. I saw a position the other day where they wanted someone to be a full-stack engineer as well as experienced in cloud infrastructure deployed with infrastructure as code, with like 7 years experience and a masters degree, and they were paying like $140k/yr max.
I just about laughed out of my chair. You might be able to get one of those things with 7 years experience for that salary. Never all of the above.
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If you want to get back to that then loo
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Electricians needed! (Score:2)
Bonneville Power staff departures under President Trump raise concerns about Northwest electrical grid [lincolnchronicle.org] So one hand gives, the other takes.
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To be fair, one organization is looking to solve a problem; the other is looking to cause problems, or are sufficiently incompetent to be indistinguishable from malice, which is it's own problem.
Electricians install wiring, not make power. (Score:5, Informative)
One might more rightly ascribe the power pinch to the mindless opposition to building infrastructure one finds in some places. And also the suing nuclear plants out of existence, tearing down hydroelectric dams because fish, and general opposition to modernity that very much exists on the environmentalist left.
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But they'd be wrong. The right wing has plenty of mindless opposition to building infrastructure. Suing wind and solar farms out of existence, opposing high voltage transmission lines, crying about
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The right wing has plenty of mindless opposition to building infrastructure. Suing wind
The right doesn't much care about the million birds killed by windmills every year.
and solar farms
But they are aware of the environment damage caused by mining the materials to build it, and to dispose of worn out panels, which isn't admitted to by the left.
out of existence, opposing high voltage transmission lines,
Like the ones that have started more deadly wildfires in California than all other causes combined?
crying about how farmland is being used when the farmers love wind power generators and, for those who've tried it, agrisolar
The only wind power generators farmers love are the small scale ones that maybe power a pump to water their cattle. The big, industrial ones installed by a power company
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How many trillions of subsidies have we given oil and gas over the decades? Subsidization continues to this very day for an industry that's well established and richer than ever before.
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No, they just hate wind turbine generators in general.
Coal ash and nuclear waste. Next.
Nope. Those are medium voltage distribution lines. Those 150k kV+ high tension l
Fuck you pay me (Score:3)
I worked briefly as an electrician and it definitely was not for me I am a white collar guy through and through. I can tell you that most electricians don't make a ton of money. The guys who get to work on the main systems of big buildings make really good money. The guys bending pipe and pulling wire top out around 25 an hour. The problem is they only need so many guys to do the electrical systems on a large building's HVAC.
It wouldn't take a heck of a lot of new employees to flood that market and drive wages down. If Google is spending 10 million they're expecting a pretty good roi and that roi is going to be lower wages.
The point being don't go into a line of work just because a company splashes a little bit of money around.
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But the rest of your post is utterly stupid. The median pay for an electrician in the U.S. is above the median household income. It's a good job and one that can't be outsourced. It's also one that has enough requirements for professional work to be immune to immigration undercutting it and it's also a vocation that no one is coming here for o
Dude it's 55,000 a year (Score:2)
And remember that's the median that takes into account all the places where it's stupidly expensive to live like New York and california. You aren't making those wages in Alabama or South Dakota.
And that's also taking into account shit like guys doing electrician work in the middle of nowhere for an oil operation or traveling the country livi
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I can tell you that most electricians don't make a ton of money.
Depends on what you consider "a ton of money". Competent electricians make a healthy middle-class living, low six figures in most of the country. I have a couple of friends who are electricians, and they do just fine. It's not software engineer money or dentist money, but it's a solid income.
The guys bending pipe and pulling wire top out around 25 an hour.
The guys pulling wire usually aren't electricians, they're helpers or maybe apprentices. Actual electricians cost more like $60-$80 per hour, sometimes more. Don't believe me? Hire one to do some electrical work in
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The guys pulling wire usually aren't electricians, they're helpers or maybe apprentices. Actual electricians cost more like $60-$80 per hour, sometimes more. Don't believe me? Hire one to do some electrical work in your house.
Exactly, a friend of mine is a qualified electrician and dudes come in before him in your new house to pull the wires before he goes there. He basically reviews everything and only plug the wire into the electrical box and makes the connection to the grid. He makes ~$200,000 a year. He relies on good staff although to do the rest of the job (e.g. pulling the wires and plug the AC outlets) properly. The helpers only have to know how to screw the wires correctly in the outlets, respect standards in the way th
Yeah but the thing is (Score:2)
I do not understand why people pretend supply and demand gets turned off for wages. I mean yes you can use unions and bargaining and solidari
Is there a disconnect here? (Score:3)
Apologies for the implied pun in my subject; but from TFA linked just 8 or 9 stories earlier, ( https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org] ), comes this quote:
"Early this year, OpenAI admitted that it loses money per query even on its most expensive enterprise SKU, while companies like Microsoft and Amazon are starting to pull back on their AI infrastructure spending in light of low business adoption past a few pilots. The problem isn't that workers are avoiding generative AI chatbots - quite the contrary. But they simply aren't yet equating to actual economic benefits."
So if OpenAI is losing money; and if Microsoft and Amazon are putting the brakes on AI investment; why is Google investing more?
Granted, it's only 10 million bucks; mere pocket change, which they may consider to be a PR expense. But it still seems odd to me. Maybe it's propaganda? Just a token investment to signal confidence in AI without committing any additional real money? It's hard to tell with these folks.