Even at $300K a year, no one available: Big Tech is buying up the carpenters

This can be seen as one of the first cases where AI infrastructure expansion has a direct impact on local communities.

The result is a shortage of labor supply for general construction, as Big Tech companies pour huge sums into large-scale data center construction and lock up skilled technical workers.

The AI companies' data center construction boom is causing a serious labor shortage in an unexpected place. Shortages of semiconductors and power equipment are expected, but skilled trade workers such as carpenters and electricians at data center construction sites are also becoming scarce.

This is because Big Tech companies, pushing for large-scale data center construction in a short period, are snapping up the workers they need.

This means demand for data center expansion will grow exponentially, requiring enormous amounts of labor and resources in the related construction market.

As chip usage in data centers surges, the construction of data centers to house them is growing proportionally. With their massive capital, Big Tech companies are locking up skilled workers such as electricians and carpenters in advance to build data centers intensively in a short time.

This 'snapping up' is intensifying the bottleneck of labor shortages at general construction sites, with a particularly marked shortage of carpenters.

Data centers must reliably support heavy server equipment and cooling systems, so they require concrete foundations far thicker than ordinary buildings. To build such large concrete structures, the role of 'formwork carpenters' who assemble precise molds is critical.

Because data centers require large numbers of formwork carpenters, demand for carpenters inevitably surges.

Carpenters play an important role in this raised floor installation as well.

Carpenters' skills are needed to create space to house electrical wiring and to build formwork, so demand for labor arises here too.

Building a single 250,000-square-foot data center requires about 1,500 construction workers. Because demand for data center construction has surged, these workers are receiving high wages.

Base salaries are reported at around $100,000 (roughly 150 million won), and skilled workers are said to earn up to $260,000 (close to 380–400 million won). This is far above the level at ordinary construction sites.

Especially when data centers are built in rural areas, a premium of around 40% must be paid to draw carpenters and electricians from remote places.

This is interpreted as a strategy to secure workers as Big Tech companies need to build data centers quickly in a short period.

Compared with the data centers built so far, many more are yet to be built.

This means a huge number of workers must be deployed to construction sites in the short term, suggesting the current labor shortage could worsen further.

As labor concentrates on data center construction, workers available for residential housing construction are becoming scarce. As the limited construction workforce flocks to data center sites, supplying other sectors is becoming difficult.

This is also making it very hard to find skilled workers in various industries, including interior work, retail, and factory upgrades.

Lowering home prices requires active new housing supply, but construction labor shortages are sharply raising costs and slowing new home construction.

Analysts argue that rising costs from the shortage of skilled workers such as carpenters ultimately reduce housing supply, acting as one cause of strong home prices.

In particular, since the launch of ChatGPT, the development and use of AI technology has accelerated, sharply increasing demand for the data centers needed to support it.

As data center completions began slipping by one to two years, Big Tech companies started running their own programs to train technicians. Microsoft began a data center technician training program in 2018 and has trained roughly 15,000 people so far.

Meta is also investing more than $100 million to produce electricians and other technicians through four-week training. These efforts are part of a push to ease the external labor shortage and build a stable workforce pipeline.

The approach of Big Tech companies training technicians through short-term programs is revealing its limits. Becoming a licensed electrician requires about 8,000 hours of skill development, which takes at least three to five years. Questions are being raised about whether workers produced in four weeks can replace experienced technicians.

In addition, unions of skilled technicians are complaining that companies training large numbers of workers through short courses are taking away their livelihoods.

As wages for skilled technicians climb too high, new construction methods that could replace them are being explored. Examples include bringing in formwork prefabricated as modular units at factories and assembling them on site, instead of building it by hand on site.

This is an alternative devised because building on site with hired workers is too difficult and costly, but modular methods cannot solve every problem right away.

Data center construction brings in roughly 1,000 workers in a short period, but after completion only a small number of staff remain to manage the facility. So once construction is finished, the large workforce that was deployed is likely to leave all at once.

This is hard to absorb, since workers hired for a short term cannot easily move elsewhere, and there are concerns that a mass exodus of workers after a data center is completed could cause a serious downturn in the local economy.

In small towns where data centers are built, a 'pop-up' phenomenon occurs as large numbers of workers flood in during construction. Demand for lodging and groceries surges, Airbnb rooms and motel rooms run out, and the town becomes so lively that people have to find lodging in nearby cities.

However, once data center construction finishes within two to three years, all the workers leave and the town is nearly empty again. There are growing concerns that if this pattern repeats, these towns could be completely ruined after a brief boom.

A similar case of local economic decline after workers leave following data center completion has already occurred in Korea's Pyeongtaek. When Samsung expanded its semiconductor plant in Godeok district, Pyeongtaek, thousands of workers flocked in and then left all at once once construction finished or halted.

As a result, the local housing market in Pyeongtaek saw vacancies and disorder, causing hardship. This past case suggests similar problems could arise in regions where data center construction is active.

Scams in which people are promised construction work in exchange for money and then disappear are occurring frequently.

As the AI era arrives, the value of blue-collar jobs is being reassessed. Office jobs face a higher chance of being replaced by AI, whereas skilled blue-collar trades such as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers are hard to automate.

These jobs are not easily replaced by AI technology, so their importance and wages are rising further. Analysts even argue that the future prospects for these workers may be brighter than for office workers.

As AI technology reshapes the labor market, the value of skilled trades that are difficult to automate is rising sharply.