Abstract:
The volume in half a year exceeded the volume of the past two years. A16Z data, the latest estimate from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), shows that data center construction spending jumped by about $25 billion in just six months, equivalent to the cumulative increase in the previous two years.
The more important thing is employment. Since the Federal Reserve raised interest rates, job vacancies in the U.S. construction industry have been falling, and other construction activities have slowed significantly. Only data centers have bucked the trend: there were less than 200,000 construction job vacancies at the bottom last year, and now they have risen to more than 300,000.
Goldman Sachs’ calculations give a general ledger: Since 2022, AI infrastructure has created approximately 300,000 new construction and professional technician jobs in the United States, of which nearly 75,000 were accounted for in the past year alone. The entire employment curve for "hard hat workers" began to reverse upward in the middle of last year.
This is the only blue-collar track in the United States that is bucking the trend and expanding its recruitment.
High interest rates have crushed residential and commercial buildings, and only AI infrastructure is paying wages. Like it or not, without data centers, the employment picture in the United States, especially the blue-collar sector, would be much uglier.
A few days ago, an American brother publicly declared: "If you want a state to become rich, you will want data centers."
Data centers have changed from "power-consuming monsters" to "employment cows". The tug-of-war between local governments has just begun. They are the ones responsible for attracting investment and environmental protection protests.
As for the "data centers that consume too much water" that environmentalists talk about, a counter-intuitive comparison was circulated across the United States this week. U.S. golf courses use about 531 billion gallons of water every year, which is 30 times more than all data centers combined (about 17.4 billion gallons). Which one should be cut first? The data is there.
Under AI, concrete, copper wire and 300,000 safety helmets will be the first to gain.
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