Data Centers Created a Blue-Collar Boom. Will Backlash End It?

In a Georgia town of 7,000 people, welder and pipefitter job postings have surged 164% year-over-year — and one family manufacturer has grown 40% in 18 months just trying to keep up.

Trey Travis runs Southeastern Hose in Bremen, the firm his grandfather started in the 1960s. The 150-person company makes thermal expansion joints for data center cooling systems.

"We've grown pretty significantly over the last 18 months," Travis said.

What does the AI buildout actually hire?

Travis's hoses are one node in a larger engine. Data center construction for OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, and other AI players is pulling in HVAC technicians, line workers, electricians, and pipefitters at a pace that has surprised labor economists.

"These are occupations that are becoming increasingly important to the AI economy," said Maria Flynn, president and CEO of the nonprofit Jobs for the Future.

Data centers get the headlines, but Flynn notes the same projects demand grid upgrades, transmission lines, and water systems. "We are seeing major sources of demand that are converging at the same time," she said.

How big is the pay premium?

The money is striking. Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter, tracks mean minimum salaries for data center roles. They jumped 125.1 percent year-over-year to nearly $208,000.

"This is suggesting that highly specialized, top-tier engineering roles are pulling the overall average up drastically," Bachaud said.

Rank-and-file pay is more modest. Flynn said an apprentice technician can take home $40,000 to $60,000. Experienced electricians command north of $100,000. Welders can graduate from high school and clear $65,000 to $75,000 a year in short order with "almost unlimited overtime."

The biggest blue-collar winners, by postings, are welders and pipefitters. Their job listings jumped 164 percent year-over-year, per Bachaud's data.

Which places are winning?

The buildout is geographically lopsided. Houston and Birmingham have seen particularly robust growth, Bachaud said.

"Places with more land to expand and build, which are often places where building regulations make development easier, cheaper, and faster, will likely be where expansion continues, versus coastal hubs that have higher costs and more regulatory burdens," she said.

Louisiana is the marquee case. Amazon committed $12 billion to a new data center there, creating 540 on-site jobs and pulling in 1,700 electricians, technicians, and security personnel. Meta's Hyperion project in the same state carries a $27 billion price tag. Both projects need on-site labor.

"These projects create demand for on-site workers and therefore cannot be offshored or conducted remotely, unlike manufacturing and software," said Justin Sinkovich, associate professor at Columbia College Chicago.

Where is the backlash landing?

None of this matches the public mood. Seventy percent of Americans oppose a data center in their local area, according to Gallup. A New York Times/Siena poll this month found roughly two-thirds of respondents opposed regardless of party. In Texas, 57 percent of voters oppose one in their own community, per a Texas Politics Project poll.

The opposition is starting to bite. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently issued a data center grid approval moratorium and halted new environmental permits. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul implemented the first statewide ban on new data centers. Data Center Watch counts at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed this year.

Oracle this week filed a "force majeure" notice on its New Mexico data center, part of the broader Stargate AI buildout. The company wants to delay payment if the facility isn't operational by 2028, citing local opposition ahead of the midterms.

Do these jobs actually last?

The skeptics are loud and credentialed. Michael Hicks, a Shenandoah University economics professor, has tracked data center impacts since the early 1990s.

"Most of the backlash is the result of developers being untruthful with local officials about potential effects, developers have woefully overpromised jobs and given tax breaks that are beyond obscene," Hicks said.

He also disputes the optimistic models. "Permanent labor market effects are muted. There are very few that have substantiative numbers beyond the early build out phase," he said.

Recent Brookings Institution research reaches a similar caveat. Local impact exists, but it can be muted and depends heavily on facility type. A hyperscaler site behaves differently from a smaller colocation center, and the evidence base "has not kept pace" with the political debate.

The numbers that drive the boom story come from one firm, real estate services company Cushman & Wakefield. Every 100 megawatts of new data center development creates nearly 1,300 local jobs, the firm estimates, generating about $110 million in annual wages, $344 million in gross output, and $187 million in gross regional product.

Hicks is not anti-data center. He's pro-property tax. If centers are taxed at household rates, he argues, the surplus can cut resident property taxes. Loudoun County, Virginia, has dropped average property taxes by $3,400 since 2020 thanks to its data center buildout.

What's the bigger labor story?

For Rachel Lipson, founder of Harvard's Project on Workforce, the question of whether data centers create jobs is settled. The more interesting question is what kind of jobs the next AI wave will reward.

"This wave of technological change looks very different from what we saw in the early days of computers and the internet and the outsourcing of manufacturing in the U.S.," Lipson said.

In the 1990s, almost all job growth flowed to workers with the highest education levels. This time, welders and pipefitters are inside the tent. "A lot of job opportunities today don't require advanced degrees. We are seeing a blue collar resurgence," she said. "But it will require making a different set of choices of where we invest in education, training, and what we support."

Labor economist Michael Rosenbaum argues the displacement narrative misses the bigger picture. "The more important labor-market story is that AI is increasing the pace at which jobs are created, transformed, and displaced," he said. The bottleneck, he argued, is not the existence of workers but the speed of training.

"It's whether we can identify them, train them, and connect them to opportunity quickly enough. AI may ultimately prove just as valuable in helping workers navigate career transitions as it is in automating work itself," Rosenbaum said.

Can the boom survive the moratoriums?

Lipson does not expect a short-term collapse. Too many projects are already approved or under construction. "In the short term, the moratoria and public backlash are unlikely to have a big impact on demand for these roles, because there are so many AI and data center projects already underway or approved that will continue moving forward despite the recent shifts," she said.

The longer the opposition spreads, the more it bites. "If moratoria spread and significantly fewer new projects are approved, eventually that would flow through to labor demand — but with a lag, as the existing pipeline gets built out," Lipson said.

Bachaud notes that planning, permits, and construction stretch for years. Even a sharp sentiment shift moves slowly through the ground. For Travis, in Bremen, the question feels academic. His welders can't keep up with the order book today, and the trade school pipeline is empty of the specific skills he needs.

"If I get a top notch welder from the local trade school, I still have on-site training because they've never seen this type of welding on this type of product before," he said.

That mismatch — booming demand, scarce specialized labor, and a public that increasingly wants the lights kept off — will define the next chapter of the AI labor story. Whether the boom outruns the backlash will be settled in county commissions, statehouses, and trade school classrooms long before it shows up in the next ZipRecruiter dataset.