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

nytimes.com

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

#241

Post by throwup238 »

pfdietz wrote: post #139
kvisner wrote: post #89

I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.

On the other hand, the economy is going to be increasingly electrified. Demand is going to be there in some form.

Especially since most of our automotive electrification is still ahead of us in most developed countries so there will be plenty of work that requires work across residential, commercial, and infrastructure.

That doesn’t mean your specific local market won’t be cyclical though. As usual the electricians in higher densities metros will probably do better with aggregate demand.

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

#242

Post by Animats »

Esras wrote: post #186
Animats wrote: post #157

Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ssp1t-g_wM

Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.

NVidia has been talking about 800VDC 1MW racks for about a year now.[1] They're trying to get others to solve the power and cooling problems. The Schneider Electric view: [2] The view from Flex.[3]

This was being talked about more in 2025 than it is now. Nobody seems to have deployed a 1MW rack yet. There are major problems to be solved for that level of power density. The fire protection people want racks in fireproof enclosures with a built in inert gas extinguishing system and smoke detectors that pull in air from many points for very fast detection. The cooling people talk about 400 gallons per minute of chilled glycol. The power people talk about arc flash protection and worker safety.

This is a scary level of energy density. Not hopeless; the switchgear and semiconductor inside locomotives are at comparable levels.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...

[2] https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2025/10/16/the-1-mw-ai-it-rac...

[3] https://flex.com/resources/megawatt-racks-are-coming-how-800...

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

#244

Post by quickthrowman »

lelanthran wrote: post #204
Animats wrote: post #157

Next, plumbers. The future of data centers seems to be more liquid cooling and less ductwork. Take a look at this new 1 megawatt server rack.[1] It has more pipes than cables. All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ssp1t-g_wM

> All that coolant flow and all that electrical power in a crowded space is scary. Maybe it's a non-conductive oil? I recall seeing someone who overclocked their PC (circa 2005) to 5GHz, and ran the motherboard completely submerged in an oil bath.

Each rack has a water (and glycol?) loop and water blocks mounted to the chips with a liquid-liquid heat exchanger that interfaces with the building chilled water loop (glycol and water), there’s no immersion.

It works like a nuclear power plant cooling system if you want to look an a diagram that is easily available. The radiated core water loop is equivalent to the rack water loop and the cooling water piping is equivalent to the chilled water loop, the difference being that data centers recirculate their chilled water loop water while nuclear plants generally discharge the water after it has passed through cooling towers.

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

#245

Post by quickthrowman »

Animats wrote: post #242
Esras wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to the video again, he clarifies early on that this is supporting multiple racks. A megawatt is 1000kW. If you took 5 B300 systems (10 rack units each), you'd still only be at 75kW, which if you're doing redundancy properly, means you have wired 150kW to the rack, but you're not generating a megawatt of heat.

NVidia has been talking about 800VDC 1MW racks for about a year now.[1] They're trying to get others to solve the power and cooling problems. The Schneider Electric view: [2] The view from Flex.[3] This was being talked about more in 2025 than it is now. Nobody seems to have deployed a 1MW rack yet. There are major problems to be solved for that level of power density. The fire protection people want racks in firepro…

> The power people talk about arc flash protection and worker safety.

800VDC is insanely scary stuff.

> At present, no consensus standard provides a validated methodology for calculating direct current (dc) arc-flash incident energy.

This means that establishing proper PPE for DC arc flashes is not possible right now. If I was asked to provide electricians to work on these racks, I would only allow my electricians to approach them, let alone do any work, if they were de-energized, full stop. Even inspecting anything while they’re energized (without doing any work) would be insane, in my opinion. Nobody’s life is worth losing over a rack of servers, and the incident energy for a 480V AC circuit that can power a 1 MW rack (1503 amps) can exceed 40 cal per cm^2 depending on the electrical system already, and there is no PPE that protects you above that incident energy level.

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

#246

Post by quickthrowman »

estearum wrote: post #173
DEF14A wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...." "Projects I work on..."

Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.

There is almost zero overlap between residential and commercial electricians. There is a shortage of residential electricians because the customers are a nightmare to deal with (both builders and homeowners, homeowners are incredibly entitled and I refuse to deal with them, lol) and the pay sucks.

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

#248

Post by ProfessorLayton »

bluGill wrote: post #198
kasey_junk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work. The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for. Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that…

The residential buyer has one advantage though: they do not demand as much from those working. You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references. Commercial projects tend to be big enough that you cannot get into them without experience (which in turn you cannot get). The crew that can build a drivew…

>The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.

This is not true at all! Parking lots are not particularly complicated, with the main obstacle being machinery and logistics. I know folks that started off residential and moved to commercial once they accumulated enough capital to buy the necessary machines to take on bigger commercial work.

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

#249

Post by Gigachad »

kvisner wrote: post #89

I would be very careful about basing your career decsions based on this trend. The data center build out will always be very boom and bust, which would really suck to work in. One year you would be making 300k working on dataceters and the next you would make 30k because thousands of electricians are now competing to build a few single family homes.

Being over reactive to anything you hear in the news is generally a bad idea. It’s always a view so zoomed in to a single blip on the chart that ignores the wider landscape.

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

#250

Post by 9x39 »

SR2Z wrote: post #162
9x39 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People would become electricians if it’s sustained, but trades tend to have boom and bust cycles. Additionally, you have significant hurdles to becoming one. You have to qualify to be an apprentice, be taken on under a journeyman or higher, and have documented hours to advance. My point was that journeymen often at an electrical shop who have apprentices are recently at Amazon without apprentices because Amazon is bi…

> My point was that journeymen often at an electrical shop who have apprentices are recently at Amazon without apprentices because Amazon is bidding wages so high they (to some extent) abandon the apprenticeship system. Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like giving folks more pathways to make money doing this work is only a good thing.

Well, the pathway requires being apprenticed to experts. There are licenses that by law limit to this pathway, but the system breaks in unexpected ways when the experts leave because it's paid better to work at a datacenter and from what I know, those journeymen are not apprenticing. Apprenticeships are capped, electricians can't apprentice 10 newcomers, so the backlogs explode.

Sure, better for the journeymen. But it leaves the newcomers behind. How is reducing pathways only a good thing?

The system isn't going to be "patched" to allow otherwise as law moves very slowly. Normally, shortages drive prices which correct the situation as people move to arbitrage - but with licensed labor (which is good, sure, things burn down otherwise) that isn't a realistic mechanism.

https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/apprentice...

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