Data centers aren’t winning many popularity contests. At least 15 states and more than 200 counties and municipalities have proposed or passed moratoriums against their development, often with bipartisan support. When it comes to the hearts and minds of the thousands of electricians I represent, however, the battle has been won. We want to build more data centers. Because the nation needs more of them.
The opposition to data centers is fueled by genuine concern — and plenty of misinformation. What’s lacking from the debate is a discussion of what happens if we don’t build. We think about data centers as benefiting tech giants such as Meta and Microsoft. But if we want to continue to enjoy using Instagram and Waze, streaming movies, banking online, hailing an Uber or conversing with A.I. chatbots, we are going to need more data centers.
With job creation sputtering, we’ve got the chance — an obligation, in fact — to expand employment in a robust sector of our economy. As of April, there were more than 3,000 operational data centers in America with more than 1,500 new centers in development. And the count continues to tick up. McKinsey predicts that by 2030, data centers worldwide will require nearly $7 trillion in capital outlays to meet the demands for compute power.
Data centers represent the best opportunity in generations for blue-collar workers to attain a portion of the American dream. A decade ago, members of my union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26, in the Washington, D.C., region, worked about 14 million hours annually. In 2025, we worked 28 million hours, and we’ll most likely top 33 million hours this year. We brought in 600 new apprentices last year alone. That job growth happened because data centers came to Northern Virginia and our members went to work constructing and maintaining them.
Our apprentices’ starting pay is around $28 an hour. Experienced electricians earn $62 an hour plus another $30 an hour in benefits. These are union careers, not gig work, and they’re open to people who might not otherwise have a clear path into the middle class.
Having spent four decades in the labor movement, I’ve seen the other side of this coin. I often found myself trying to save jobs that were already gone by the time I arrived. That has taught me the difference between an industry that is creating opportunity and one that’s extracting it. And unlike in the early days of the railroad and automotive industries in the 19th and 20th centuries, the data center industry has included labor as a meaningful participant in the development process from the beginning. This is an opportunity that will exist for decades.
The debate shouldn’t be data centers, yes or no. Instead, it should center on the rules and who enforces them. Over the years, the best operators I have worked with, CloudHQ, Equinix and Stack Infrastructure, have been genuinely responsive to community concerns, working hard to mitigate noise, improve aesthetics and invest in technologies that reduce environmental impacts. And yes, there are impacts.
Innovation in energy and resource efficiency, though, is not just a reaction to criticism — it’s central to the industry’s success. Communities that partner with data centers on water-recycling systems, transparent power-purchase agreements and community benefit agreements that specify the host area’s gains before any permits are issued deliver real revenue and real jobs with manageable costs. Communities that allow developers to write their own rules have, predictably, suffered worse outcomes.
That bad news has spread widely, souring public opinion against data center construction. I get that. Conversely, the pushback is creating an opportunity for labor unions to become a constructive partner. The increased scrutiny leads to conversations about work force standards, apprenticeship, community benefits and long-term career opportunities.
A generation ago, construction electricians moved from project to project as work shifted from region to region. Data centers have changed the equation. Rather than arriving as a single project that ends with a ribbon cutting, data centers are built in phases over years and then continually upgraded, expanded, reconfigured and maintained as technology evolves. That leads to steady, local, long-term employment. Today, in places including Loudoun County, Va., our members buy homes near the job site because the job site isn’t going anywhere.
Northern Virginia is filled with data centers that not only provide a living wage but also improve living standards. Loudoun is also one of the wealthiest counties in the country, where the typical homeowner receives roughly $5,800 a year in tax benefits — from lower rates — tied to a data center industry that now supplies roughly half of the county’s property tax revenue. County officials report that for every dollar these facilities consume in county services, they return $26 in tax revenue.
Yes, communities should deny a permit to a badly sited, poorly regulated facility. But blanket opposition to data centers, often fueled by NIMBYism, robs hard-working Americans of the type of career opportunity that is increasingly rare. Regulators and politicians need to focus on which regions are best equipped to responsibly meet increasing data center demand. If the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and other regions that tend to have strong labor and environmental standards reflexively say no, this growth doesn’t disappear; it just moves elsewhere, with fewer safeguards and weaker worker protection.
Data centers are the aqueducts of our era: essential, unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether a region is part of the next century’s economy or left behind by it. Rome’s aqueducts weren’t built anywhere, anyhow — they were engineered, maintained and governed. Many are still standing. We must have the same standard for this industry: Don’t just build it. Build it to last.
Don Slaiman is the political coordinator of I.B.E.W. Local 26, which represents electrical workers in the Washington, D.C., area.
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