i'm peripherally attached to the trades and this absolutely gets at the issues faced by local unions. part of what we need to see campaigners doing - especially when communicating with trades members - is making the point clear that our rulers are offering us either homes for GPUs that steal the work of society, cook the planet, and promise to destroy our jobs, or nothing. This is especially salient for tradesworkers who are told by capital, and the government that represents it, that making real the fever dream of data centers as far as the eye can see is more important than infrastructure to improve our housing, transportation, and energy systems.
Thank you for this article. I would add that data centers currently use a huge amount of energy much of which is created by burning fossil fuels. The resulting climate change impact (not to mention energy bill increase) is not good for working people (to put it mildly). Guardrails could theoretically solve this, if we can require data centers to provide clean energy and force them to pay for it.
I don't much like data centers sucking up low carbon energy. Once we look at them through the prism of modern carbon economics these things are terrible.
Thank you for this great article, with so much thorough research. I agree that our construction trades need challenging good jobs, but we are depending on data centers only to fill that niche of good jobs. What's missing is that many people were looking forward to the trajectory President Biden was setting us up for in 2024 - the WORK needed to convert our American infrastructure FROM a fossil fuel society TO A green energy society. There were going to be millions of new work for blue collar and white collar workers. This large-scale shift (called the Clean Energy transition) would focus our whole economy away from fossil fuels using strategic electrification and decarbonization.
The Green New Deal could consist of: Infrastructure Upgrades, New Energy Sources & Job Creation.
Dr Julio Friedmann writes about it in his substack from 2024:
"I know a bit about climate change, clean energy and carbon management technologies, the energy transition, climate and energy policy, and why businesses make decisions when considering these issues.
“I have worked exclusively on climate and energy for the last 22 years. in government, academia, industry (mostly working for you, dear reader). Over these years, I’ve reached one big conclusion: we talk all wrong about countering climate change.
There are only three tasks to do in total:
1. Reductions: We must swiftly & profoundly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors and geographies. Period.
2. Removals: We must also remove CO2 from the air and oceans. In part, this is because we waited too long on reductions. In part, because this can restore some of the damage from prior and future emissions.
3. Clean products: We must produce fuels and building materials and food and services that do not substantially add GHGs to the air and oceans. Humans will continue to build and use things, and we need options that won’t add to the problem.
That’s it."
Even author Timnit Gebru recently mentioned in an interview with Democracy Now! that this speed racing with AI doesn't have to be so fast that it shocks our culture,
Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias (8/13/26) @DemocracyNow!
We don't hear the AI hyperscalers talking about REAL future jobs for We The People. Big Tech sees only a competitive race for their AI dominance. Meanwhile, our planet is in trouble.
Excellent piece. I enjoyed the bit about office workers asking manual laborers to hold back on doing something that might take their job. Enlightening.
The AI companies basically lied when they claimed their glorified chatbots would eliminate huge swathes of the white-collar workforce. Mark Zuckerberg tried to replace workers with AI, getting rid of 8,000 Meta employees and moving 7,000 into AI roles. The end result? AI-generated code changes jumped 220% but new features reaching users only rose 36%. Major incidents spiked 40% and time spent firefighting those incidents was up 70%. So Zuck cancelled further layoffs because AI failed to deliver—mostly it's good for low-value grunt work and while it does generate a lot of code, the code is riddled with errors that a human has to go back over and remove.
The one thing I would add to this discussion that's not much talked about in leftist circles is that public sector pensions and people's 401k plans could take a massive hit if/when the AI investment bubble bursts. A huge proportion of the stock market's total value now has AI exposure and AI-related economic activity accounts for something like 50% of current GDP growth, so the fallout would ripple into data centers, construction, HVAC, and infrastructure where a lot of the new AI-related jobs are being created.
i think for me as an expert engineer in the past field work for data centers to me is like any tech work once the contract is done its done so its a temp job but then what do people get afterwards to harvest build this for tech companies. great article thanks for the informative writing.
i'm peripherally attached to the trades and this absolutely gets at the issues faced by local unions. part of what we need to see campaigners doing - especially when communicating with trades members - is making the point clear that our rulers are offering us either homes for GPUs that steal the work of society, cook the planet, and promise to destroy our jobs, or nothing. This is especially salient for tradesworkers who are told by capital, and the government that represents it, that making real the fever dream of data centers as far as the eye can see is more important than infrastructure to improve our housing, transportation, and energy systems.
Thank you for this article. I would add that data centers currently use a huge amount of energy much of which is created by burning fossil fuels. The resulting climate change impact (not to mention energy bill increase) is not good for working people (to put it mildly). Guardrails could theoretically solve this, if we can require data centers to provide clean energy and force them to pay for it.
I don't much like data centers sucking up low carbon energy. Once we look at them through the prism of modern carbon economics these things are terrible.
Thank you for this great article, with so much thorough research. I agree that our construction trades need challenging good jobs, but we are depending on data centers only to fill that niche of good jobs. What's missing is that many people were looking forward to the trajectory President Biden was setting us up for in 2024 - the WORK needed to convert our American infrastructure FROM a fossil fuel society TO A green energy society. There were going to be millions of new work for blue collar and white collar workers. This large-scale shift (called the Clean Energy transition) would focus our whole economy away from fossil fuels using strategic electrification and decarbonization.
The Green New Deal could consist of: Infrastructure Upgrades, New Energy Sources & Job Creation.
Dr Julio Friedmann writes about it in his substack from 2024:
The Work ~ Introduction to me and this series
by Julio Friedmann
SEP 09 2024 | Substack
https://carbonwrangler.substack.com/p/the-work?r=kxzps&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
"I know a bit about climate change, clean energy and carbon management technologies, the energy transition, climate and energy policy, and why businesses make decisions when considering these issues.
“I have worked exclusively on climate and energy for the last 22 years. in government, academia, industry (mostly working for you, dear reader). Over these years, I’ve reached one big conclusion: we talk all wrong about countering climate change.
There are only three tasks to do in total:
1. Reductions: We must swiftly & profoundly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors and geographies. Period.
2. Removals: We must also remove CO2 from the air and oceans. In part, this is because we waited too long on reductions. In part, because this can restore some of the damage from prior and future emissions.
3. Clean products: We must produce fuels and building materials and food and services that do not substantially add GHGs to the air and oceans. Humans will continue to build and use things, and we need options that won’t add to the problem.
That’s it."
Even author Timnit Gebru recently mentioned in an interview with Democracy Now! that this speed racing with AI doesn't have to be so fast that it shocks our culture,
Timnit Gebru on AI Hype, Ethics & Algorithmic Racial Bias (8/13/26) @DemocracyNow!
https://youtu.be/aCB-NQtsKrs?is=6OETtdvRxsZQoWM_
.
We don't hear the AI hyperscalers talking about REAL future jobs for We The People. Big Tech sees only a competitive race for their AI dominance. Meanwhile, our planet is in trouble.
Excellent piece. I enjoyed the bit about office workers asking manual laborers to hold back on doing something that might take their job. Enlightening.
Excellent analysis!
The AI companies basically lied when they claimed their glorified chatbots would eliminate huge swathes of the white-collar workforce. Mark Zuckerberg tried to replace workers with AI, getting rid of 8,000 Meta employees and moving 7,000 into AI roles. The end result? AI-generated code changes jumped 220% but new features reaching users only rose 36%. Major incidents spiked 40% and time spent firefighting those incidents was up 70%. So Zuck cancelled further layoffs because AI failed to deliver—mostly it's good for low-value grunt work and while it does generate a lot of code, the code is riddled with errors that a human has to go back over and remove.
The one thing I would add to this discussion that's not much talked about in leftist circles is that public sector pensions and people's 401k plans could take a massive hit if/when the AI investment bubble bursts. A huge proportion of the stock market's total value now has AI exposure and AI-related economic activity accounts for something like 50% of current GDP growth, so the fallout would ripple into data centers, construction, HVAC, and infrastructure where a lot of the new AI-related jobs are being created.
i think for me as an expert engineer in the past field work for data centers to me is like any tech work once the contract is done its done so its a temp job but then what do people get afterwards to harvest build this for tech companies. great article thanks for the informative writing.
The tech bros will tolerate just enough union labour to buy off the union bros who in turn will shill for, and fund, the political bros.
It’s a pity that it takes a mere 30%. What a bargain!
The test for data centers is simple would you want one next to your neighborhood let's say within a block