Data center buildout electricians selling out

As Big Tech pours billions of dollars into expanding America’s data center buildout, a wave of new opportunities has opened up for the electricians tasked with wiring these massive, sprawling facilities.

In many cases, the enormous scale of these projects and their aggressive construction timelines have sparked fierce talent wars to attract the industry’s most skilled workers. The U.S.-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has framed its members as the backbone of the growing AI revolution, releasing a set of “Data Center Principles” in March that argues union labor is “essential to the future of AI.” Major tech firms are rushing to meet the moment: Meta recently launched a new skilled trade academy program, while Google has committed $50 million to train new workers in in-demand trade fields.

But as national opposition to large-scale data center development grows, ethical debates about the boom have begun popping up in online electrician communities.

Threads discussing AI’s long-term impact on the economy now fill r/electricians, a popular subreddit with roughly half a million monthly visitors. Some users worry that the data center work they do today will ultimately contribute to widespread job loss across industries. Others grapple with whether their labor makes them complicit in harm to local communities, or if accepting data center contracts is inherently unethical. For many, the answer is uncomplicated: at the end of the day, work is just work.

One anonymous electrician based in the Midwest says he no longer tells new acquaintances what he does for a living. As a single person navigating dating, he told WIRED, “the conversation shifts or gets shut down altogether” once he reveals he works on data centers. He recalls multiple instances where people told him “how terrible it is that you’re contributing to something like that,” adding, “That's usually the last time you hear from them.” Like other sources who spoke to WIRED, he requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters.

He shares his own concerns, mostly about the rise of work scams and how “corporate greed” could leave workers vulnerable. But he actively sought out a data center role, even taking a pay cut to get his foot in the door. He saw the job as a unique opportunity for upward mobility: hired as a journeyman electrician, he was promoted to management within months, and hopes to transition into an engineering role long-term. “I did just see it as, ‘Well, this is most likely going to be a major part of our future. And if you can't beat them, join them,” he says.

Another electrician named Ryan, meanwhile, says he has never worked on a data center project and probably never will. “I think world governments, not just our own, are becoming more right-wing and more fascistic,” he tells WIRED. He doesn’t trust corporations operating within this current political context, and believes executives like Elon Musk and Palantir’s Alex Karp are all “suspicious at best.”

If AI were destined for widespread benevolent use, Ryan believes things would be different. But he argues the current reality looks more like “four or five AI companies just exchanging money with each other in a circle.” He’s also deeply concerned that the current hype has created an unstable AI bubble. As an IBEW member, Ryan has the agency to accept or turn down job offers from his union, and says his local branch occasionally posts small contracts for local data centers that he has found easy to avoid. Even if he were out of work for an extended period, he would still find it “really tough to want to take that job call.” He also turns down other work he deems unethical, including contracts at private prisons. Still, he says, “if they're going to get built, I'd rather they go union.”

Jesse, an IBEW electrician, tells WIRED he understands community pushback against new data centers. “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,” Jesse says. But he argues those issues should be addressed by holding state and local governments accountable, not by blaming electricians who need work to support their families. This is a common sentiment across the industry: the forces driving the data center buildout are far larger than any individual worker, so why should one person be judged for taking a job on these projects?

Dante, an electrician who has worked on data centers operated by Intel, HP, and Amazon, tells WIRED that “Nobody judges me” for his data center work, because “we're almost always working for the worst possible people in the end, but we all need a paycheck because of the unlivable world that those same rich people have created for us.”

“Either I'm wiring up a lumber mill or a Dollar General warehouse or a data center or an Amazon facility or whatever else,” Dante says. It’s “essentially the same kind of work—all for already extremely rich pieces of shit to use for the exploitation of the working class so they can get more rich.”

For other electricians, that rationalization doesn’t hold up. One anonymous electrician tells WIRED that widespread job scarcity has fostered a common mindset that since workers “have to put food on the table,” they should be immune to criticism for the work they accept. Pushing back against this mindset, they say, “would not end well at a union hall.” But privately, they reject this logic.

“If work is tight and a company comes in and wants to build orphan-crushing machines (or some other diabolical contrivance), you'll get a lot of shrugged shoulders, grim faces, and ‘I hope they pay double for overtime,’” the electrician says. “It's an attitude I hate.”

“I've participated in some professional development groups where different degrees of compartmentalization are deployed to justify the work, usually landing on ‘It's going to be built no matter what, I might as well get paid,’” an apprentice electrician tells WIRED. They note that for many people, a paycheck will always justify the work they do, “regardless of what the project is.” “But of course that's easy for me to say,” the apprentice adds, “because my livelihood doesn't depend on them.”