From the Wall Street Journal, November 29:
Surging demand means six-figure pay and more perks
DeMond Chambliss used to run himself ragged with the small contracting business he owned in Columbus, Ohio: hanging drywall, chasing clients for payments and managing half a dozen employees.
Since April, Chambliss has worked the night shift overseeing a team of 200 welders, plumbers and electricians at a local data-center construction site. He makes more than $100,000 a year—a significant increase from his previous pay—cruising around on a buggy under floodlights, overseeing deliveries and equipment and ensuring everything stays on schedule.
“I pinch myself going to work every day,” the 51-year-old said.
An investment boom in artificial intelligence is creating a thirst for massive data centers—and a bonanza for the workers building them. It is unclear how long that boom will last, but for now, workers like Chambliss are cashing in on high demand for their services. They are enjoying the trappings including perks, bonuses and, in many cases, pay boosts.
Data centers don’t employ many workers once they are actually built. During construction, though, they are a hive of workers pouring concrete walls and foundations, wiring electric panels and installing equipment such as power generators and chillers to ensure servers are cooled to a precise temperature at all times.
Given such complexity and high demand, workers who move into the data-center industry—in roles ranging from electricians to project managers—often earn 25% to 30% more than they did before, said Jake Rasweiler, senior vice president of data centers at Kelly Services, a staffing and recruitment firm.
“It’s like the gold rush,” Chambliss said.
Data centers are ballooning in size, and a single project can take years to construct and require thousands of workers. Tech giants such as Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft operate 522 data centers and have an additional 411 data centers in development, according to Synergy Research Group.
In Hermiston, Ore., Marc Benner, 60, arrives in the predawn hours at a data-center construction site and lines up with scores of workers for a series of synchronized stretches. After that, he spends the day making the rounds ensuring electrical safety. These are lucrative skills at the electricity-gobbling sites, and Benner makes $225,000 a year, boosted in part by $100 in daily incentive pay for all workers on site.
“It’s my American dream,” said Benner, who has been helping build data centers for 15 years, including the ones now powering AI.
Demand for such workers is colliding with a longstanding shortage of skilled tradespeople that has pinched the construction industry. The Associated Builders and Contractors trade group estimates that the construction industry is short roughly 439,000 workers, mostly among skilled workers who do things like lay pipe and wire electrical panels.
The effects are starting to pile up. A survey by the Uptime Institute of data-center equipment manufacturers, engineers and construction companies found that 52% said staffing shortages on sites had caused business disruptions, up from 43% last year. Contractors working on data centers have an average backlog of 10.9 months of work, compared with eight months for their peers, according to data from ABC.
“There’s an arms race taking place in the world of artificial intelligence,” said ABC chief economist Anirban Basu.
Clune Construction, a Chicago-based general contractor, said it is trying to ensure workers have access to the same creature comforts as white-collar workers, including heated and air-conditioned break tents and perks like periodic free lunches. Around 70% of the company’s revenue is from data-center work, a figure that has roughly doubled in the past year.
Tempe, Ariz.-based construction company Sundt recently started offering bonuses and paid time off to workers on its sites. Still, the company regularly has to turn down more projects, said Chad Buck, Sundt’s president of building.
“There aren’t enough people to build the magnitude of the work out there right now,” Buck said. “There’s only a set pool to pull from, and every general contractor in the country is trying to pull from it right now.”
Construction workers say this heavy demand has created a sense of security that, for them, is often elusive. “In this industry, stability is a really big thing,” said Michael Damme, 43, who makes $200,000 a year overseeing concrete construction at three data-center sites for Sundt....
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We saw some other $200K p.a. jobs in yesterday's "Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors for America’s Commercial Fleet".
