The data center buildout is driving blue collar job growth — and everything else is falling by the wayside

Data centers are powering your chat ramblings — and the growth in the American construction industry.

AI buildouts are set to become the largest capital expenditure project in US history, per a Brookings Institution analysis, outpacing spending on highways and railroads as a share of GDP.

That massive spending and construction boom needs workers to — literally — prop it up.

And blue-collar employment for data centers is booming, with the number of nonresidential specialty trade contractors — workers like electricians in non-residential buildings, which includes data centers— growing by 86,000 in the past year. “I think it’s fair to say that a very large portion of construction labor demand right now is being driven by increasing data center construction activity,” said Zach Fritz, an economist at Associated Builders and Contractors.

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The American Institute of Architects found, based on multiple forecasts of nonresidential construction, that data center construction spending is set to climb more than other kinds and account for about 8% of nonresidential building spending by 2027.

But the sustainability of that jobs boom could be precarious.

Construction spending on the whole has fallen 3.8% year-over-year as of July, according to the Census Bureau, and KPMG finds that data centers are a “structural growth driver” for spending.

Year-over-year spending on data centers has grown by just over 57%, a sharp contrast to both residential and non-residential private spending growth since early 2025.

For now, the data center boom is good news for construction workers and larger industry spending.

Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the research organization Burning Glass Institute, said one concern is if the data center boom cycle ends up being shorter than anticipated: “And all of a sudden, we trained a lot of electricians, people like that, to do stuff that is no longer needed,” Berger said.

Job postings on Indeed for data center-related roles have skyrocketed, up almost 130% from about two years ago, while overall postings are down compared with the same period.

About half of the data-center demand this year came from the IT infrastructure, operations, and support occupational group and the installation and maintenance occupational group.

A job-posting analysis from Lightcast, a job market intelligence company, showed a rise in demand for some data-center-related jobs.

Based on growth in average monthly job postings from January to August 2022 and the same period this year, postings for electrical engineers within the utilities sector have increased 34%, and 22% for project management specialists.

Within commercial and institutional building construction, there’s been a rise in demand for construction managers, project management specialists, cost estimators, and civil engineers.

And so, in the short term, the data center boom will likely remain a workhouse for the construction industry.

What’s more unclear is the longer-term prognosis, especially since AI infrastructure is still reliant on a slice of hardcore spenders to keep it afloat. “The next few years, it’s stable.

We’re going to keep building data centers,” Fritz said.

But rising community opposition could eventually limit the rate of growth, he said, or technological advancements might require smaller footprints. “There’s all kinds of things that could happen here,” he said. “They’re not going to happen anytime soon.” It’s unclear how permanent data center jobs will ultimately be, especially after data center construction, but listings on Indeed at least suggest firms are advertising them as long-term.

Aubrey Woessner, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, said only about two in every 1,000 data center postings are temporary. “‘Permanent’ is a label the employer chooses, and there’s reason to think it may overstate how durable these roles really are: Local incentive agreements often require a project to create a set number of permanent positions, which gives employers a reason to post that way regardless of how long a given build-out job actually lasts,” Woessner said.

Are you in a data center-related job?

Reach out to these reporters to share at mhoff@businessinsider.com and jkaplan@businessinsider.com.