Comment on The AI boom is so huge it’s causing shortages everywhere else The $700 billion AI spending spree has few precedents. Good luck finding an electrician or a reasonably priced smartphone.

rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• cannedtuna@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Well yeah, it’s right there in the first sentence

  Electricians are getting harder to find, and some construction projects are on hold.

  They’re talking about commercial construction. Because of all these data centers being built electricians are being moved around because of the money being thrown at these projects. Dallas has been a hub for tech sector projects for a while; because of all the new data centers being built in Texas there are out of state electricians coming in for these projects from neighboring states like OK. Funny tho, now that Oklahoma is starting its own data center boom, now electricians from OK would just rather stay there which is causing projects in TX to stall.

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  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    An Inside Wireman does not do the work of a Residential Wireman. They CAN, they just don’t.

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    • cannedtuna@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      He doesn’t mention residential inside wireman anywhere in the article. He’s quoting someone who notes that skilled labor is moving away from complex construction project, such as multi family, to data centers. Multifamily is in the commercial sector rather than residential.

      There are not enough skilled electricians and other specialized trade workers for both data center projects and other complex construction, Basu said, such as apartment buildings, factories and health care facilities. AI data centers tend to be more lucrative for construction firms, which relegates anything else to a lower priority.

      The quoted person does mention residential, but attributes the decline in residential building to things like material prices and other factors. Lumber has been high for quite sometime which really impacts residential as they rely on lumber heavily for beams and framing, whereas commercial uses metal for beams and framing.

      Basu said that a decline in U.S. manufacturing of homes, offices and factories would probably occur even without the AI data center construction boom, because of factors including climbing costs for building materials, zoning restrictions, higher tariffs and stricter immigration policies. But he notes that AI data center demand is probably worsening chronic capacity shortages in construction.

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      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That’s just flat out incorrect

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• mynona@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s also weird to single out electricians when it’s the construction companies themselves that are being dragged across the globe to the few places that will auto stamp new data centers. There’s a private compound in the Western US that doesn’t allow reporters and is blowing millions to bring workers in from thousand of miles away. Rumor is local crews weren’t considered because they’d be more likely to report environmental concerns in their own backyard.

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  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Huh, where’s that?

    Last data center I was on outside Cheyenne, WY there were about 100 iron workers from Texas doing their thing.

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    • mynona@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Fernley, details these days are hard to find since the tech companies started moving in.

      nevadaappeal.com/…/45-million-industrial-sale-clo…

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• SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  While you are not wrong about these different specialities within the trade, there can still be an effect. Let me illustrate:

  Suppose you like bananas but not apples. One day there is an apple disease that kills most of the apple trees leading to a collapse of the apple market. You feel relieved because you don’t eat bananas anyways. But you go to the supermarket and find that not only are the apple shelves empty, the banana shelves are empty too! Why? Well people still gotta eat, and not everyone is as picky as you, they switched to bananas and now the banana market is under supplied too. And it’s not like you can build a banana farm overnight.

  Back to electricians, if the salaries of data center electricians increases rapidly, you will find that those electricians who are qualified for both might focus on data centres, straining the supply of residential electricians. Just like with banana orchards, it takes time for new electricians to enter the market, and those will be swayed to the data center specialty first, further straining the residential market.

  We can see a real example of this with the price of RAM. RAM manufacturers saw increased demand for data centre RAM so they switched focus to that market and it ended up drying out the consumer side supply, hence the surge in price. And just as with banana plantations and electricians, you can’t start up a RAM fab overnight.

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  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    wut? A Residential Wireman doesn’t even go into the space for Inside Wireman. Then there’s the fact that the space where an Inside Wireman works is tiny compared to the rest of the data center.

    What are you basing your opinion on?

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    • knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I would rather see you explain why electricians would never change their field of work.

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      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Residential Wiremen are not qualified to be Inside Wiremen

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Oh, so Residential never switch, got it.

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      • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        They need more training

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