The AI industry’s massive push to build data centers and deliver more compute has found another unsuspecting victim — home construction contractors. According to The Texas Tribune, data centers are hiring electricians en masse, resulting in a shortage of workers for housing projects. The Lone Star State is currently in a two-pronged boom: it’s adding more residents, with more than 2.6 million people migrating into the region from 2020, and it’s also playing host to hundreds of new data center projects. This means that a lot of construction projects are competing for specialized electrical workers from the same pool of about 71,000 electricians.

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