Sean Nickell, 32, and Chris Bennett, 35, sat in a booth below a television blaring a Seattle Mariners baseball game. For years, they had followed each other to job sites around the country without knowing it. “I have just met this man all of a monthish ago, and the parallels are horrifying,” Bennett deadpanned.
They were here to build data centers, the brawny concrete buildings with HVAC systems the size of tractor-trailers that power the new artificial intelligence systems that the tech industry believes are the key to its future — and perhaps the future of the entire economy.
Electricity is the lifeblood of technology. And perhaps more than any computer technology that has come before it, building AI needs vast amounts of computing and the electrical power to make that happen.
So electricians are flocking to regions around the country that, at least for now, have power to spare. These traveling electricians are transforming the sagebrush here in central Washington, with substations going up on orchards and farmland. Hundreds have come to a triangle of counties tied together by hydropower dams along the Columbia River. They are chasing overtime and bonuses, working 60-hour weeks that can allow them to make as much as $2,800 a week after taxes.
For all the hype over $100,000 chips and million-dollar engineers, the billions pouring into the infrastructure of AI is being built by former morticians, retired pro football linebackers, single moms, two dudes described as Gandalf in overalls, onetime bouncers and a roving legend known as Big Job Bob.
AI is shaping up to be the kind of economy-bending force that inevitably creates winners and losers. That’s true locally, where the construction work will eventually slow down and the region will land on a new normal. But what the new normal turns out to be is anyone’s guess.
Bennett was from Erin, Tennessee, a “middle-of-nowhere” town, where an electrician he trained under suggested traveling because he could earn more, build more and see that there was more to this world than just Tennessee.
In nearby Quincy, where data centers started going up about 15 years ago for the internet boom that came before today’s AI boom, rumor has it that a local farmer sold his land for a data center and bought three Porsches — one red, one white, one blue. The agricultural town is rich, though most residents are not. It has a gleaming new high school, built with property taxes that one union official described as “straight-up data center money.” Still, 4 out of 5 students are eligible for free lunch.
The poverty rate for the district has inched down over the past decade, but how far it goes — and whether the opportunities outweigh the rising costs of living — is another open question.
In Washington, the work is all union, a condition of a state tax break that has saved the tech companies almost half a billion dollars. And the electrician union — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — is stretched: Microsoft alone has said it will need 2,300 electricians in the coming years. The union plans to train hundreds more apprentices.
Nickell and his wife, a medical imaging technician, have been on the road full time for six years. “We should be able to retire when I’m 43, 45,” he shrugged. “Something like that.”
By 7:30 p.m., Side Chicks was emptying out. Work started at dawn.
From the Ice Age to the Age of AI
Tumbleweeds the size of trash cans blew across the road as Alex Ybarra, a state representative, steered his black SUV through Quincy, population 8,315. His grandparents began cycling through this dead, flat land in the 1950s as farmworkers. Eventually, they stayed. For decades, his mother trimmed potatoes at the French fry factory that supplied McDonald’s.
Ybarra left for college, and eventually came back and worked at the local utility. “See all these streets?” he said, driving past the pink Mexican mercado and under power lines. Many roads were just gravel, “and there was no sidewalks anywhere, even downtown.”
That the modern internet would be powered from the sagebrush of central Washington dates back partly to the cataclysmic floods at the end of the last ice age.
As the climate warmed, a miles-wide ice dam on a glacial lake near Missoula, Montana, repeatedly failed, sending water whooshing downhill. With more force than all the world’s rivers combined, the water took just two days to haul through Washington and Oregon, bursting out to the Pacific Ocean. The floods carved narrow, vertically walled canyons that provided a tantalizing source of hydropower a century ago.
But the region, sparse and poor, could not afford dams. Around 1955, George Washington’s great-great-great-great grandnephew, a lawyer for the utility, helped broker a deal: The region’s richer areas helped fund dam construction, but in return locked in cheap hydropower for half a century.
When the deal expired in 2005, the timing could not have been better. The utility could keep more cheap, clean electricity for itself, just as big technology companies were starting to build data centers for their online businesses.
“When the data centers said, ‘We need energy,’” Ybarra recalled, “We said, ‘Oh yeah, we got plenty.’”
Microsoft bought about 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy the next year. (...)
In 2006, Washington State enacted its first sales tax break for data centers to encourage construction. For years, there had been handshake agreements to build with union workers, Mr. Hepner said. “It worked for a while, but corporations do what corporations do, trying to cut costs.”
When the tax breaks came up again in 2022, “we were like, ‘It stops right now or this tax exemption goes away,’” said Mr. Hepner, who had lobbied for the union.
But tax breaks pale in importance to finding power, land and labor. Four of the largest tech companies spent more than $200 billion in the last year on capital expenses, largely to build new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year.
“I can’t think of a site selection or placement decision that was decided on a set of tax incentives,” said Bo Williams, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s data centers in North America.
The data centers spread west from Quincy to the dusty hillsides of East Wenatchee, then, recently, down the Columbia River to tiny Malaga, using transmission lines that fed a shuttered aluminum plant. The three clusters are strategic: Each is in a different county, with its own utility and power supply. There are already about 50 data center buildings, and more than 1,500 electricians working in the region.
Central Washington is just one of dozens of “hot spots” on Where2Bro.com, an unofficial bible for traveling electricians. The site lists gigs in Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Texas and beyond, all booming as tech companies crawl the electrical grid for supply. Take the note from the union’s Local 124, based in Kansas City. “WORK IN LU 124 SHOULD BE EXCELLENT FOR SEVERAL YEARS TO COME,” it blared. “WILL NEED HELP FROM OUR TRAVELING BROTHERS AND SISTERS TO MAN IT.”
by Karen Weise, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jovelle Tamayo
[ed. I live about 40 miles from Quincy and have been through three booms in my life: the early 60s tourism boom in Hawaii; the post-Alaska pipeline boom and Prudhoe Bay oil extravaganza; and the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup and settlement windfall. All I can say is, things are going to change, permanently, and not necessarily for the better (or worse). In the short-term, you might expect communities to be overun by transient workers with little connection to the local culture or sense of place (and the usual problems - increased drugs, prostitution, crime, lack of housing, overburdened services, etc). But, long-term, if you don't have a good plan in place or a secure vision for what you want your community/state to become, it'll be a free-for-all and a lot of money will just get wasted or blown on useless stuff. Usually people just go crazy for a while. How long that lasts and what's left after is the question.]
