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Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is For Sellouts (wired.com) 110

Posted by BeauHD from the work-is-work dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: 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. An anonymous Midwest electrician who spoke to Wired acknowledged concerns about scams, corporate greed, and AI's impact on workers, but said he views data centers as an important source of career advancement. "This is most likely going to be a major part of our future. And if you can't beat them, join them," he said.

An electrician named Ryan, meanwhile, is strongly opposed to working on data centers because he distrusts the corporations and political environment driving AI development. Still, if the facilities are going to be built, he would prefer union workers construct them. "If they're going to get built, I'd rather they go union," he said.

Jesse, an IBEW electrician, sympathizes with communities negatively affected by data centers but does not believe the electricians building them should be blamed. In his view, opposition should instead be directed toward policymakers and the project approval process. "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," he told Wired.

An electrician named Dante echoed some of those sentiments, arguing that data center work is no more ethically compromised than many other commercial construction projects. "We're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck," he said. He added that such projects are "essentially the same kind of work," typically performed for wealthy corporations seeking to become even richer.

Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is For Sellouts More | Reply

Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is For Sellouts

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  • Is vice signaling the new virtue signaling? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bryanandaimee ( 2454338 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @03:06PM (#66204548) Homepage
    Datacenters are literally Hitler, but I need the money, so ...

    • Re: Is vice signaling the new virtue signaling? (Score:4, Informative)

      by linear a ( 584575 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @03:14PM (#66204556)
      Godwin's law kicked in early on this thread.

      • Re: Is vice signaling the new virtue signaling? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @03:41PM (#66204622)

        I would say that recent developments have made Godwin's Law obsolete.

      • I guess I inadvertently (advertently?) derailed the major point with the minor one, but it does seem to me that professed beliefs take a back seat these days to personal benefit. There seems to be a significant trend to lean into it in fact (ergo "Vice signaling"). "I think it's evil, but until someone makes it illegal I'm going to get mine." Is it a new thing or as old as time? I don't know. It seems to be more blatant/unapologetic these days.
    • Data centers are strong evidence of a death cult, but I'd avoid invoking Godwin's Law.
      • Not sure why anyone would bother to avoid it anymore. I was of course mocking the "literally Hitler" crowd, but it's been done to the point that it's meaningless. I doubt Godwin's law has any relevance in today's society. Almost any moderately difficult discussion starts at literally Hitler and devolves from there. If you use disposable water bottles you're literally Hitler. Any opinion you might possibly have? You guessed it, literally Hitler.

      • The guys who built those giant ovens could have told themselves that somebody was going to be baking a whole lot of bread ... very inefficiency.

        Somebody wired up all those ICBM missile silos too. The ones who do think all of the above is just fine. There will always be someone.

        • Somebody wired up all those ICBM missile silos too

          On the other hand, people might also genuinely thing their country, the people and the land is worth defending, at all costs.

          I mean, c'mon....at the very least, we have "Ranch Dressiong".....you know...?

        • As far as I can tell, Mutual Assured Destruction actually WORKS as a deterrent... even Pootie-poot has never fired a nuke. The good ol' USA is the only known practicioner of nuclear annihilation .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      Datacenters are literally Hitler, but I need the money, so ...

      except for the noise issue in some places, which COULD be solved with engineering (possibly driven by zoning Code changes), data centers are like the best "industry". they didn't cause traffic, they don't cause any local pollution... compared to the taxes and employment they give of, I can't think of something with lower impact. (of the top of my head. )

      and the noise issue isn't inherent. the few data centers I've been in were silent from the outside in normal operation. (vs when running backup gene

      • At least in my neck of the woods, we have ZERO spare water. We're in a 'negative water' situation. Using any water is a problem. That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

        • Re:It's the water: Re:Is vice signaling (Score:4, Interesting)

          by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @04:07PM (#66204692) Homepage

          The latency of the actual processing is way higher than the latency of network distance. Why are these being built where water isn't plentiful? They could literally build a combination hydro plant and data center in one and use the same water for cooling as they do for power generation. It's the way of the original industrial revolution to build along rivers.

          • Re:It's the water: Re:Is vice signaling (Score:5, Informative)

            by Jumperalex ( 185007 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @05:08PM (#66204794)

            The answer is land cost, power access and cost, tax incentives, zoning. In no particular order.

            Or said another way, until recently the impact of water-over-use was an external cost in the decision process. Just like power over-use was. Now they both are being factored into permitting requirements and that means cost have the costs finally.

            By costs here I don't mean the rates they negotiate for consumption of either water or power. I mean the cost of scaling production and distribution to prevent everyone else having to pay more because a data center was allowed to come in and spike demand without and investment in supply growth / demand efficiency.

            • That is wildly inaccurate. Unless you live in Texas (because they were stupid enough to change this) your local public service commission sets the rates you pay for electricity. They do this based on operating costs and planning. There is no "demand-based" increase in costs, in part because this is one of the reasons they're a public utility--so the people don't get priced out of something considered essential or squeezed dry by capitalism run amok in a monopoly market. It's highly unlikely that anywhere

              • I figure if they're doing evaporative cooling, it's probably because water is so abundant where they are that there isn't a cost to doing so.

                I'd also say that you're assuming too much of the PSCs. People don't pay much attention to them, leaving a lot of room for incompetence, corruption, and rotten ideas. PSC elections did become a priority here in Georgia over the last cycle, and fortunately we kept the people who wanted to freeze the rates and keep he rule that says datacenters have to pay for the n

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          At least in my neck of the woods, we have ZERO spare water. We're in a 'negative water' situation. Using any water is a problem. That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

          And many places where they put them up, they don't have enough power infrastructure either. So power bills go up as well.

          • If they have a PSC run by idiots maybe. In Georgia it's already the rule that they have to pay for any needed upgrades or extra supply.

        • Re:It's the water: Re:Is vice signaling (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @05:00PM (#66204776)

          That makes the narrative that data-centers are 'water hungry' very effective at causing unrest.

          Which is probably why that narrative gets pushed so hard. You CAN build a datacentre with evaporative cooling and that will use a lot of water. You can also build one with a closed loop and radiators that doesn't use any water except for the original fill. You can even build one that's air cooled and doesn't use any water at all.

          All of those options also apply to anything else that needs to be cooled, which is pretty much everything.

          • Yeah but in practice virtually zero of them are actually closed loop. Even when it is claimed they are there is often a cooling tower which is used sometimes, which means they only sometimes operate in a closed loop mode.

            • That is entirely unsupported by fact. Closed loop systems that use glycol is the norm. There are no hidden cooling towers waiting around the corner to touch your no-no square.

              This is absolutely not the place to be making up or even repeating fanciful nonsense, because here there are lots of people who actually know something about data centers and data center operation.

              • This is absolutely not the place to be making up or even repeating fanciful nonsense, because here there are lots of people who actually know something about data centers and data center operation.

                So what does that have to do with you?

                With dry-cooler-based designs, itâ(TM)s a closed-loop system with no evaporative water cooling â" outside of maybe 1% of the year when we might need chillers in some climates [nvidia.com].â

                Which in the really real world of global warming, can rapidly turn into a lot more than 1%. And designs like what's described above are IN THE MINORITY.

                If you want to present yourself as knowing something about a subject, you'd better not immediately prove you don't, as you did her

          • But then the closed loop systems need ten natural gas turbines to provide the energy for cooling.

            • ...when they're poorly designed by people who probably shouldn't be allowed to design building-sized facilities, sure. But once again, the vast and overwhelming majority of sites only have generators for emergency backup if the grid fails because that's always more expensive than a hookup to the local grid (who will always be able to produce electricity for less because their infrastructure is massive in comparison, and more efficient).

              Some may ask, why do they have these generators when they also have UPS

              • No you don't understand. All these data centers expected enough power from the utilities. But when the wait was months to a year, they all started building gas turbines in lieu of the local utility.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Yeah, this is apparently where the water usage numbers come from. Somebody makes up a stupid number and then that gets repeated over and over.

          • My thinking is that the reason that particular narrative gets pushed so hard is because most of the people who can be encouraged to histrionics by complete strangers don't even know enough to understand what they're reading. They'll see a data center say it pumps two million gallons a day without understanding the significance of closed loop (meaning it's the same 100 gallons or so running around in a circle all day long) and decide that very large number scares them, so it must be bad and "closed loop" mu

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Tracking down the source of silly datacentre water usage was a bit of a sport for a while. It seems a lot of it traces back to a single writer who sort of picked a number.

        • That makes it extra insane that the current witch hunt is operating with an almost complete absence of facts. The vast and overwhelming majority of data centers operate with closed loop cooling systems that are a about half ethylene glycol and half purified water. They require topping off by only a very small amount, if they require it at all.

          Thinking that this adds significantly to a water crisis is like becoming irate about someone putting in a kiddie pool. ...except the data center doesn't get dumped o

          • So the cooling loop is a hermetically sealed ethylene glycol filled system. NOBODY but nobody cares about that; that is what people call a red herring at best and a diversion at worst. Every large building uses this type of system in some capacity.
            What provides the cooling to the main loop? Is it provided by refrigeration, via water chillers? Then it uses gobs of power, which is a concern to other customers of the power supply. Is it provided by evaporative cooling towers? Then it uses gobs of water and a s

        • But it's just a narrative. A lot of water goes into the construction, mostly in cement I'd think, but once complete they can get by with far less. If there's not much water in the area, they'll use closed loop cooling.

          We use far more water for golf than we do for datacenters.

      • It's okay. The anti-datacenter sentiment and protests are a great thing. Why? Not because it will stop data centers from being built, but because it'll cause them to move from places like California to places like West Virginia. That's awesome. I love it. Take those high paying jobs & their income taxes away from lefty nutjob governments with "diverse" residents and move it to a place like West Virginia which thankfully isn't diverse and also has a lot of poor folks who could use those extra electrician

        • Re:Just accel the move from Blue to Red states (Score:5, Informative)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @05:09PM (#66204796)

          There are no high paying jobs in data centers, just destruction of quality of life for locals. Perfect for red states, they are accustomed to being shit on, they vote for it.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by rta ( 559125 )

            There are no high paying jobs in data centers, just destruction of quality of life for locals. Perfect for red states, they are accustomed to being shit on, they vote for it.

            What are you comparing it to? A Starbucks? a farm? a walmart? A FedEx depot? A prison? A chicken processing plant? a call center?

            The ops jobs at a data center be they phys plant, security or IT, are a pretty decent and better than many jobs available in rural areas.

            Also, again, what negative "quality of life" impact is it having? (except for the noise, in the minority of places that that's an issue. yes those ARE ridiculous and that should have been addressed during permitting. should be addre

            • The ops jobs at a data center be they phys plant, security or IT, are a pretty decent and better than many jobs available in rural areas.

              While this is true, those jobs are few in number.

              Also, again, what negative "quality of life" impact is it having?

              Historically, little. The bulk of DCs have typically been located where people could go to them because that used to be more necessary, and therefore they were concentrated around tech firms. And they were planned out years in advance, and mostly sited where it made sense. They also weren't maximally power-dense, as there were other considerations. AI DCs are more power intensive, as they're shoving as many processors and as much memory as possible into every

              • "well documented"

                The howling of the unwashed illiterates on social media does not count as "documentation", even by a little bit.

                • The howling of the unwashed illiterates on social media does not count as "documentation", even by a little bit.

                  So then why are you bothering to howl? IDGAF, even a little bit.

            • The ops jobs at a data center be they phys plant, security or IT, are a pretty decent and better than many jobs available in rural areas.

              What are *YOU* comparing to? You use rural while people are talking about industrial developments. Ops jobs at a datacentre pay worse than most jobs in manufacturing, and definitely worse than virtually all jobs in heavy industry (which you often find in rural areas).

          • Wrong.

            Normal Fulltimers:
            Data Center Technician: $55,000–$88,000
            Critical Facilities Engineer / Data Center Engineer: $90,000–$150,000
            Data Center Operations Manager / Data Center Manager: $115,000–$155,000
            Network Engineer (Data Center): $120,000–$147,000
            Electrical / Mechanical Engineer (Data Center): $110,000–$160,000
            Project Manager (Data Center): $130,000–$180,000


            Common Contractors:
            Diesel Generator Technician / Mechanic: $55,000–$85,000
            HVAC / Chille

          • That's just something you guys tell yourselves to self-soothe. Sure, if all you do is rack servers and connect cables, then yeah, the pay is maybe $50k to $60k, which is meh. But if you're doing engineering work, i.e. configuring VM, SAN, networking, power management, etc, you're looking closer to $90k, which, depending where you live, isn't bad at all, and in most of the US you'd be doing fairly well on it.

            • None of which requires you to be anywhere NEAR the data center. Thus the data center provides virtually no long term jobs. All the construction is done by preferred contractors, not locals, so people swoop in, build the center, and leave. The locals get nothing.
              • Well, municipal tax revenues go up. There's more economic activity no matter how many people are employed at the site. And there are people employed at the site. They don't ship cement from across the country, and that's just one of the things that gets sourced locally. They don't bring in construction workers from across the country to build the building and facilities, those are locals.

                And if you think about it, since data centers don't have a massive workforce, they don't put that much of a load o

          • Untrue and disingenuous. The "high-paid" people aren't in the data center because that's the whole freaking point of data centers. A place where the computers they require can exist without them having to lay hands on them all the time. ...but without data centers, no one's getting paid to know how to manage highly-redundant large scale systems because that's going to go towards maintenance of the self-hosted facility they'll need to pay for running just to get to that point.

            Also, i f your company is lett

            • You know what the local government gets even if there are no people working at the data center at all? Millions and millions of tax dollars every year. The property taxes these places pay are insane.
          • I drive past a big one all the time, and the hospital next door isn't complaining about quality of life. Nor is the farm on the other side. Nor is the city. The land was zoned industrial, now there's light industry on it.

        • Maybe, you should pay attention. The biggest complaints are RED STATES. The rural people are being colonized and they know it. Data center construction in their eyes is the ultimate "FUCK YOU" thing ever. Big use of land, no jobs of any note, most of the jobs are from outsiders who just come in, do the work and leave, and any considerations of the local are totally swept aside by some mix of educated engineers, corrupt politicians, and rich oligarchs.

          The lefty governments by the way, are the ones who create

          • Maybe, you should pay attention.

            Maybe you should stop paying attention to the Left-wing news sources that are filling you so full of hate and incorrect info.

            The biggest complaints are RED STATES.

            That's simply not true [gallup.com]. Opposition is biparitsan and happening in both Blue and Red states. That article highlights that Republicans are very marginally more friendly to data centers (the polling at least), but it's only a 1% difference.

            Data center construction in their eyes is the ultimate "FUCK YOU" thing ever.

            They are building many in my area and that's not at all what I hear people saying. I also don't get that impression even from reading about data cente

      • ... compared to the taxes and employment they give of, I can't think of something with lower impact.

        What taxes? A lot of these things are being built on sweetheart deals that exempt the owner from taxes for long periods of time.

        What employment? The construction jobs are for skilled tradespeople who would have no shortage of other jobs to do in the absence of these projects. And there are only a handful of jobs at the finished data centers.

        And then there's what they're being used for - AI slop generation and mass surveillance, mainly. We'd be better off paying all these people to dig ditches and

    • Shssh, don't tell them guns are made in factories that...wait for it...require electricity. Guess all those electricians should be help accountable same as the gun manufacturer.

      While we are at it, might as well sue Chevy and Coors for drunk driving. Sue sunscreen makers for skin cancer and the list goes on. I wanna sue the gas station for selling gas...

      Or there is absolutely ZERO outrage here and electricians are going to electrician.

      P.S. Should we burn all the doughnut shops down since cops eat donuts? Tha

    • Civics and philosophy are above an electricians pay grade, nor is it for them to determine alone.

      Some solidarity from the IBEW on the issue of AI and data center bubble would be nice. But the lack of a unified popular position is a key hurdle right now. It is unreasonable to expect electricians to fight for a position that AI opponents cannot clearly communicate.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rta ( 559125 )

        Civics and philosophy are above an electricians pay grade, nor is it for them to determine alone.

        Some solidarity from the IBEW ...

        Umm... IBEW journeymen probably make more than 95+% of civics and philosophy professors, think tankers, and politicians. (Certainly those in Coastal California do, but many of the guys in other areas do quite alright too)

        i know it's just a turn of phrase, but it's interesting to consider. AND they're pretty AI proof too.

        • When I was an apprentice, the journeymen were better at arithmetic than this, probably because it was life and death calculation when dealing with a 3-phase 100A circuit. (all my very obsolete and half-forgotten training is in industrial, not whatever they have going on in data centers)

    • Soon enough, robots fed by AI from other datacenters will start building newer ones, bypassing Unions once again

  • Why would anybody sell out? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @03:16PM (#66204564)
    "Ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has only been one answer to that question." -- Clarence Darrow

  • Not everyone can be enlightened (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @03:46PM (#66204638) Journal

    Let's keep our focus on the people behind these projects, shall we? Not the caterers, the electricians, the plumbers, or the company that mows their lawn. They're just trying to pay the bills man.

    Yes, I get it, if it's your holy mission to oppose AI datacenters sure, you go right ahead and chain yourself to the front gate. But the fact is that most people don't have the luxury to morally evaluate their job for nuances of "whatever is bothering reddit today".

    • " Yes, I get it, if it's your holy mission to oppose AI datacenters sure, you go right ahead and chain yourself to the front gate. But the fact is that most people don't have the luxury to morally evaluate their job for nuances of "whatever is bothering reddit today". "

      This statement alone is worth a gold plated mod point. A true rarity to find it on Slashdot these days.

       

  • This is why there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. The worst people have the most money because they have no compunctions about harming others.

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by not.a.socialist ( 6650346 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @04:31PM (#66204728)
    The electricians comments smell like coder comments

  • Death Star (Score:5, Funny)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday June 22, 2026 @04:33PM (#66204732)

    "We're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck."

    Funny, that's exactly what I'd imagine the electricians and other trades who built the Death Star would've said.

    Hard to feel sympathy for them when it exploded. They knew the risks.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Randal's argument was never legitimate. It supposed those trades people were free agents who could turn down the job without getting force choked.

    • Why did I have to scroll this far for this comment.

    • I doubt they were made aware of the super top secret risk of an instant complete explosive disintegration of the entire moon sized battle station. Maybe the few electricians working on that one conduit knew, but no doubt they were killed before they could chat about it in the station's cafeteria. Instead they were probably told by the government that the DS was the safest battle station to work on ever constructed.

    • Nobody likes their boss. We work for the paycheck, because we have families to support... or sometimes just a habit to feed.

  • The more tradeis that are trained, the quicker the salary drops.

  • Now building robot electricians, on the other hand...

  • Paychecks are for sellouts.

  • I mean, what could go wrong with giving that kind of authority to union workers?
  • Someone took the contents of a subreddit and wrote an article about it pretending it represented the industry? And we're supposed to act like this is journalism? Screw off.

  • It's a free country. You don't have to work if you don't want to.

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