In the PR battle for AI data centers, tech giants got a blue-collar ally

The most consequential alliance in American infrastructure is not between corporations and Congress, or between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. It is between the building trades unions and the technology companies building the data centers that power artificial intelligence. It is an unlikely partnership. On one side are organizations that trace their lineage to the labor movements of the early twentieth century, built on collective bargaining, prevailing wage laws, and apprenticeship programs that have trained generations of electricians, pipefitters, and ironworkers. On the other are the five richest companies in the world, whose combined market capitalization exceeds 15 trillion dollars and whose business models depend on the compression of labor costs through automation. What binds them together is the single largest construction boom in the United States since the interstate highway system.

The scale of the buildout is difficult to overstate. North America's Building Trades Unions, the umbrella organization representing 14 craft unions, hit a record number of members and apprentices in 2025, and its president, Sean McGarvey, has compared the current expansion to the trade union growth of the 1950s. The comparison is instructive. The postwar construction boom was driven by federal investment in housing, highways, and defense infrastructure. The current boom is driven by private investment in data centers, power plants, and the energy infrastructure required to run them. The hyperscalers, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle, are collectively on track to spend more than 650 billion dollars in 2026 on capital expenditure, a figure that exceeds the GDP of most European countries and that flows disproportionately into construction labor.

The unions have not been passive beneficiaries of this spending. They have become active advocates for the industry that employs them. In statehouses from Virginia to Illinois to Maine, union representatives have shown up at legislative hearings to oppose data center moratoriums, environmental restrictions, and tax reforms that would make it harder for tech companies to build. In municipal meetings from St. Louis to Joliet, Illinois, to Hobart, Indiana, ironworkers and electricians have stood alongside tech executives to argue for project approvals, often providing the only voice in a room full of opponents that speaks in favor of construction. The Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council, led by Rob Bair, has been a visible presence at Governor Josh Shapiro's side when the governor announced Amazon's 20 billion dollar data center investment in the state.

The political realignment this creates is significant. Building trades unions have historically been a reliable Democratic constituency, but their alliance with tech companies has placed them on the opposite side of progressive Democrats who want stricter regulation of data center energy consumption, water usage, and community impact. Pennsylvania state senator Katie Muth, a Democrat, has said that unions oppose her data center regulation bill because they do not want to promote anything that would impede data center development. In Virginia, the state that hosts the world's largest concentration of data centers, unions fought against efforts to end the sales tax exemption that helped make the state a magnet for construction. In Illinois, they opposed requirements that data centers supply their own energy. The pattern is consistent: unions are advocating for the conditions that keep their members employed, even when those conditions conflict with the environmental and community concerns that progressive Democrats typically champion.

The tech companies, for their part, have embraced the partnership with a pragmatism that would have seemed improbable a decade ago. Google says the majority of labor used to build its data centers is unionized and has contributed 10 million dollars to a union-backed electricians training program. OpenAI's Sam Altman issued a joint statement with the building trades in March praising the skilled union workers who are laying the foundation for the AI economy. These are not gestures of solidarity. They are investments in a labor pipeline that the industry desperately needs. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 26 in metropolitan Washington, D.C., estimates that data center work accounts for at least 50 percent of its members' hours. The Columbus-Central Ohio Building and Construction Trades Council puts the figure at 40 percent. The United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters reports that its members are working on over 90 percent of data center projects in the United States, a market share that its general president, Mark McManus, acknowledged is exceptional.

The boom has delivered tangible results for workers. The Boilermakers Local 154 in southwestern Pennsylvania went from recruiting zero apprentices for four consecutive years, as power plants shut down and the fossil fuel industry contracted, to assembling a class of over 200 new apprentices in direct response to data center and power plant demand. Apprentice classes in electrical trades have doubled in size across multiple states. Training centers are undergoing expansions to accommodate the influx. This is not theoretical job creation. It is the kind of hiring surge that transforms communities, particularly in regions where the decline of coal and manufacturing had hollowed out the skilled trades workforce.

The criticism of this alliance is predictable and not without merit. Mark McManus of the plumbers and pipefitters acknowledged the tension directly: if we chose to have a moratorium on data center construction, they would still be built. He is describing a structural reality. The demand for AI compute is not contingent on union approval. The 650 billion dollar capital expenditure commitment from the hyperscalers will be spent regardless of whether union labor or non-union labor builds the facilities. The unions have chosen to capture the work rather than protest it, and in doing so they have acquired both economic leverage and political influence that they would not otherwise have.

But the alliance also creates accountability problems. When union representatives are the only people at a city council meeting speaking in favor of a data center project, as happened in Hobart, Indiana, the democratic process is not functioning as it should. When unions lobby against environmental regulations on data centers, the communities that bear the costs of increased water and energy consumption are not represented at the negotiating table. When Alicia Morales complained at a Joliet, Illinois, city council meeting that union members had bullied residents who opposed an Amazon data center, she was describing a dynamic that the unions' own leaders would find uncomfortable to defend in any context other than job creation.

The deeper question is whether this alliance can survive the inevitable consolidation. Data center construction is a finite project. The current buildout is projected to peak within the next three to five years as the major hyperscalers complete their initial infrastructure deployments. After that, the demand shifts from construction labor to operations and maintenance, which requires a fraction of the workforce. The unions that have expanded their apprenticeship programs and hired new members on the strength of data center demand will face a reckoning when the cranes come down and the facilities switch to a staffing model that runs on a few dozen technicians rather than a few thousand construction workers.

What This Means For You: The union-tech alliance is reshaping how infrastructure gets built in America, and it affects you whether you work in construction or not. If you are in the skilled trades, this is the biggest hiring window in a generation, and the apprenticeship programs are expanding to meet it. If you live in a community where data centers are being proposed, the unions will be the most organized voice advocating for construction, and they will not necessarily represent your interests on energy costs, water usage, or zoning. If you are an investor watching the AI buildout, the labor pipeline is a constraint that the tech companies are actively managing through partnerships and training investments, which means construction timelines and labor costs are less of a risk than they might appear. The alliance is real, it is productive, and it is temporary. The question is not whether it works today. It is what happens when the building stops.