Employment among nonresidential specialty trade contractors in the United States, including electricians who work on commercial buildings, grew by 86,000 jobs over the past year as construction firms rushed to build data centers for artificial intelligence, according to Business Insider’s analysis of federal labor data.
Data center construction spending rose at an annualized rate of nearly 60% in July compared with a year earlier, reaching a pace of more than $75 billion, according to Census Bureau data cited by an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis. Data centers accounted for all of the month’s 0.1% growth in nonresidential construction spending, the trade group found.
“I think it’s fair to say that a very large portion of construction labor demand right now is being driven by increasing data center construction activity,” said Zach Fritz, an economist at Associated Builders and Contractors.
AI buildouts are on track to become the largest capital expenditure project in US history relative to the size of the economy, according to a Brookings Institution paper by Columbia Business School professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh presented at a Brookings conference in September. The paper estimates AI investment in data center buildings, power systems, networking and chips will total $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, an average of 3.63% of gross domestic product a year, exceeding the share of GDP the country spent building its railway network in the late 19th century.
The American Institute of Architects, based on multiple nonresidential construction forecasts, projects that data center construction spending will keep rising faster than other categories and account for about 8% of nonresidential building spending by 2027.
Postings surge as overall hiring cools
Job postings for data center-related roles on the hiring platform Indeed have more than doubled over the past two years, even as overall postings fell roughly 12% nationally, according to an Indeed Hiring Lab report published in July. Data center jobs now account for about six in every 1,000 US postings, up from two in 1,000 in May 2023, the report found.
Roughly half of this year’s data-center hiring demand came from the IT infrastructure, operations and support occupational group and the installation and maintenance group, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. Installation and maintenance workers alone make up about a quarter of all data center postings, the report said.
A separate analysis by the job-market intelligence firm Lightcast found postings for electrical engineers within the utilities sector rose 34% and postings for project management specialists rose 22%, comparing average monthly postings from January to August this year with the same period in 2022. Within commercial and institutional building construction, demand also increased for construction managers, cost estimators and civil engineers, Lightcast found.
Uncertainty over how long the boom lasts
Total US construction spending fell 3.8% year over year as of July, according to the Census Bureau, even as data center spending climbed more than 57% over the same period, according to an analysis by KPMG, which described data centers as a “structural growth driver” for the industry.
Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, said one risk is that the data center boom ends sooner than expected. “And all of a sudden, we trained a lot of electricians, people like that, to do stuff that is no longer needed,” Berger said.
Fritz said demand should hold up in the near term. “The next few years, it’s stable. It’s going to keep growing. We’re going to keep building data centers,” he said, though he said community opposition to new projects or technological advances that shrink data centers’ physical footprint could eventually slow growth. “There’s all kinds of things that could happen here,” he said. “They’re not going to happen anytime soon.”
Community pushback has already become a factor in some markets, with a 2026 survey by the Associated General Contractors of America and the National Center for Construction Education and Research finding 58% of construction firms say data center projects are increasing competition for workers and pushing up wages.
Only about two of every 1,000 data center job postings on Indeed are listed as temporary, said Aubrey Woessner, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. But she cautioned that the label may not reflect how long the roles actually last.
“‘Permanent’ is a label the employer chooses, and there’s reason to think it may overstate how durable these roles really are: Local incentive agreements often require a project to create a set number of permanent positions, which gives employers a reason to post that way regardless of how long a given build-out job actually lasts.”
The Census Bureau is scheduled to release its next construction spending report, covering August 2026, in the coming days, which will show whether the data center-driven growth in nonresidential spending continued into the late summer.