A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands

FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.

I used to be an electrician.

I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.

For example, keep the lights on for schools.

You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.

No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.

Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.

>Datacenters are fine.

Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.

It just might have to do with where electrical grid interconnect happens to currently be with spare capacity. These corridors also happen to be where it's going to be easiest to put up even more long distance high voltage transmission.

Datacenter siting has went from "where the fiber lines run" to "where we can get power" rather rapidly. I have friends who's entire job is basically trying to find locations where there is still transmission capacity available, and if not immediately, where it can be built out rapidly over existing rights-of-way to avoid as much of the NIMBY as possible. Projects that were taking a decade or more are now being planned for completion in 1-3 years. Delays went from permitting, lawsuits, funding, etc. and are now seemingly gated by component availability. These manufacturers are ramping up as rapidly as they seemingly can do so.

Transmission lines are by far the hardest part of the puzzle to solve. And yes, datacenters are about the only thing that has accelerated their buildout in my lifetime. I've watched projects that were paused for close to a decade to bring wind energy from the southern part of my home state to the metro load center area all of a sudden get jump-started again due to there actually being immediate capital available to build them and make it worth dealing with the NIMBY folks.

Datacenter siting is obviously more complex than this, but yeah - if you can get 80% of your transmission line from a power generating locating closer to your urban load centers you would be an idiot not to jump on the opportunity regardless of the reasons why.

Wide scale infrastructure build-outs are always messy and wasteful. Every single one in history has been. This is how shit gets built - not 20 years of careful planning and consideration.

Some of us have been paying attention to the grid far longer than this latest AI bubble craze. This was always coming for us, demand simply got brought forward half a decade or more. Eventually you run out of the investments your grandparents made and have to actually build stuff again. The US simply has collectively forgotten what that looks like.

There will be plenty of stranded misallocated capital. That's just how these things go. But there will be plenty of reusable infrastructure left in it's wake like always. If the US is ever going to reindustrialize at all, then this is about the easiest and least impactful means to begin doing so.