Weekend Read — The Labor Angle
Building Trades Unions Become Big Tech’s Unlikely Data-Center Allies
A Fortune investigation finds North America’s skilled-trades unions — at record membership — have become the most effective public advocates for AI infrastructure, countering community opposition more credibly than the companies themselves.
A Fortune investigation published Saturday finds that North America’s Building Trades Unions — the umbrella organization for skilled-trades locals in construction, electrical, mechanical, and pipefitting work — have become the most effective public advocates for Big Tech’s data-center expansion. With membership at a record high in 2025, the unions are showing up at zoning hearings, statehouse committee rooms, and town meetings to back projects backed by Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and a half-dozen hyperscaler-aligned developers. Corporate executives, by contrast, rarely appear in person at those venues.
The numbers driving the alliance are concrete. Apprentice class sizes have doubled at several locals since 2023; man-hours logged on data-center projects have climbed faster than on any other category of nonresidential construction tracked by union timekeeping systems. For trades that spent the previous decade competing with offshoring and prefab automation, AI’s hunger for poured concrete, conduit, switchgear, and copper is the largest sustained domestic infrastructure tailwind in a generation.
Politically, the coalition is awkward. Democratic legislators in states with active data-center battles — Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and Oregon among them — are increasingly caught between progressive constituencies opposed to the energy load, water draw, and community displacement of hyperscale builds, and blue-collar constituencies whose dues-paying members are seeing the largest paychecks of their careers. Fortune’s reporting suggests the unions have so far proven the more decisive voice on the margins where these projects are approved or denied.