AI, the electricians and the boom towns of Central Washington

EAST WENATCHEE, Wash. — The tangy smell of Buffalo wings filled Side Chicks Sport Bar, as a dozen electricians crammed their big frames into booths. It was Tuesday night in East Wenatchee, Washington, and “brotherhood night” for the electrical union. Out-of-towners and locals swapped notes on who was coming and going, when new jobs were starting and what drama had gone down with a foreman.

Sean Nickell, 32, and Chris Bennett, 35, sat in a booth below a television blaring a Seattle Mariners baseball game. For years, they had followed each other to job sites around the country without knowing it. “I have just met this man all of a monthish ago, and the parallels are horrifying,” Bennett deadpanned.

They were here to build data centers, the brawny concrete buildings with HVAC systems the size of tractor-trailers that power the new artificial intelligence systems that the tech industry believes are the key to its future — and perhaps the future of the entire economy.

Electricity is the lifeblood of technology. And perhaps more than any computer technology that has come before it, building AI needs vast amounts of computing and the electrical power to make that happen.

So electricians are flocking to regions around the country that, at least for now, have power to spare. These traveling electricians are transforming the sagebrush here in central Washington, with substations going up on orchards and farmland. Hundreds have come to a triangle of counties tied together by hydropower dams along the Columbia River. They are chasing overtime and bonuses, working 60-hour weeks that can allow them to make as much as $2,800 a week after taxes.

For all the hype over $100,000 chips and million-dollar engineers, the billions pouring into the infrastructure of AI is being built by former morticians, retired pro football linebackers, single moms, two dudes described as Gandalf in overalls, onetime bouncers and a roving legend known as Big Job Bob.

AI is shaping up to be the kind of economy-bending force that inevitably creates winners and losers. That’s true locally, where the construction work will eventually slow down and the region will land on a new normal. But what the new normal turns out to be is anyone’s guess.

Bennett was from Erin, Tennessee, a “middle-of-nowhere” town, where an electrician he trained under suggested traveling because he could earn more, build more and see that there was more to this world than just Tennessee.

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In nearby Quincy, where data centers started going up about 15 years ago for the internet boom that came before today’s AI boom, rumor has it that a local farmer sold his land for a data center and bought three Porsches — one red, one white, one blue. The agricultural town is rich, though most residents are not. It has a gleaming new high school, built with property taxes that one union official described as “straight-up data center money.” Still, 4 out of 5 students are eligible for free lunch.

The poverty rate for the district has inched down over the past decade, but how far it goes — and whether the opportunities outweigh the rising costs of living — is another open question.

In Washington, the work is all union, a condition of a state tax break that has saved the tech companies almost half a billion dollars. And the electrician union — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — is stretched: Microsoft alone has said it will need 2,300 electricians in the coming years. The union plans to train hundreds more apprentices.

Nickell and his wife, a medical imaging technician, have been on the road full time for six years. “We should be able to retire when I’m 43, 45,” he shrugged. “Something like that.”

By 7:30 p.m., Side Chicks was emptying out. Work started at dawn.

From the Ice Age to the Age of AI

Tumbleweeds the size of trash cans blew across the road as Alex Ybarra, a state representative, steered his black SUV through Quincy, population 8,315. His grandparents began cycling through this dead, flat land in the 1950s as farmworkers. Eventually, they stayed. For decades, his mother trimmed potatoes at the French fry factory that supplied McDonald’s.

Ybarra left for college, and eventually came back and worked at the local utility. “See all these streets?” he said, driving past the pink Mexican mercado and under power lines. Many roads were just gravel, “and there was no sidewalks anywhere, even downtown.”

That the modern internet would be powered from the sagebrush of central Washington dates back partly to the cataclysmic floods at the end of the last ice age.

As the climate warmed, a miles-wide ice dam on a glacial lake near Missoula, Montana, repeatedly failed, sending water whooshing downhill. With more force than all the world’s rivers combined, the water took just two days to haul through Washington and Oregon, bursting out to the Pacific Ocean. The floods carved narrow, vertically walled canyons that provided a tantalizing source of hydropower a century ago.

But the region, sparse and poor, could not afford dams. Around 1955, George Washington’s great-great-great-great grandnephew, a lawyer for the utility, helped broker a deal: The region’s richer areas helped fund dam construction, but in return locked in cheap hydropower for half a century.

When the deal expired in 2005, the timing could not have been better. The utility could keep more cheap, clean electricity for itself, just as big technology companies were starting to build data centers for their online businesses.

“When the data centers said, ‘We need energy,’” Ybarra recalled, “We said, ‘Oh yeah, we got plenty.’”

Microsoft bought about 75 acres of bean fields in Quincy the next year.

Matthew Hepner, a union leader, was an apprentice when he was assigned to work at that data center; a straight-up concrete box, not even painted.

But the Great Recession arrived, and work halted.

“I took a job trapping gophers for two bucks a tail to get by,” Hepner said.

Things picked back up about two years later. Yahoo and other tech names set up shop, as did independent data center companies that rented their spaces. One developer used the code name Maserati for their client, but everyone swore it was Microsoft.

Taxes and Schools

In 2006, Washington state enacted its first sales tax break for data centers to encourage construction. For years, there had been handshake agreements to build with union workers, Hepner said. “It worked for a while, but corporations do what corporations do, trying to cut costs.”

When the tax breaks came up again in 2022, “we were like, ‘It stops right now or this tax exemption goes away,’” said Hepner, who had lobbied for the union.

But tax breaks pale in importance to finding power, land and labor. Four of the largest tech companies spent more than $200 billion in the last year on capital expenses, largely to build new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year.

“I can’t think of a site selection or placement decision that was decided on a set of tax incentives,” said Bo Williams, the executive responsible for Microsoft’s data centers in North America.

The data centers spread west from Quincy to the dusty hillsides of East Wenatchee, then, recently, down the Columbia River to tiny Malaga, using transmission lines that fed a shuttered aluminum plant. The three clusters are strategic: Each is in a different county, with its own utility and power supply. There are already about 50 data center buildings, and more than 1,500 electricians working in the region.

Central Washington is just one of dozens of “hot spots” on Where2Bro.com, an unofficial bible for traveling electricians. The site lists gigs in Indiana, Iowa, Georgia, Texas and beyond, all booming as tech companies crawl the electrical grid for supply. Take the note from the union’s Local 124, based in Kansas City. “WORK IN LU 124 SHOULD BE EXCELLENT FOR SEVERAL YEARS TO COME,” it blared. “WILL NEED HELP FROM OUR TRAVELING BROTHERS AND SISTERS TO MAN IT.”

Data centers have substantially increased the total value of property in Quincy, Ybarra said, “so that means the data centers pay for about 75% of all taxes.”

Ybarra, who was on the school board when it proposed a successful $108 million bond for construction, pulled up to the high school, an expansive two stories of glass and light wood floors, and wrapped around a courtyard.

Graduation rates are high, but fewer than a third of students go to college, so the school prepares them for trades. They weld in an agricultural fabrication shop and learn stair construction — and geometry — at a wood shop. A group of girls were training as wildland firefighters. The weight room has views of apple orchards and there’s a community health clinic open to families.

Felicie Becker, the ball-of-energy principal, said she loved the facilities, but more than anything, it was helping recruit great teachers who had never considered a rural district with its many challenges. Most students are poor, and about a third are learning to speak English.

The community is betting that the incredible building can translate to the kind of life-changing education that lifts a family out of poverty.

In Moses Lake, about a 30 minute drive, Mitch Molitor caters to the steady business of traveling workers at Suncrest RV Park, which he owns.

The sloping site near the interstate had once been a nine-slide water park, but it went into bankruptcy after its owner, a spud-farmer-turned-Ponzi-schemer, was convicted in a commodities pyramid scheme. It now has a pickleball court. Many residents come from Seattle, where construction has stalled, and return home on weekends. A few bring families — there’s a school bus stop right outside.

Molitor worries the data centers are a sugar high, with few jobs in the long run. “They use a lot of ground, and they use a lot of power,” he said. “I like to see the stuff that makes a bigger return to the community.”

A Housing Crunch and Union Jobs

Just after 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, a sea of hard hats streamed out of a data center built by the developer CyrusOne that everyone seemed to think would be leased by Microsoft. (The tech company will not say.) They poured into the long row of trailers serving as break rooms. Several dozen ended up a few miles away at Monkey N’ Around Pizza.

Sharyl Smith, the owner, said the weekly union nights were her “saving grace.” She staffed up on Thursdays, so that no one waited on beers, and offered specials to keep customers coming back. This week, it was $20 for baby back ribs, corn on the cob, a cornbread muffin and jalapeño mac and cheese. She sold out in 30 minutes.

Nearby, Jesus Zafra, 36, shared a meaty pizza with Juan Ramirez, 28, from Dallas. They met at a data center two years ago, when someone heard that both of their parents were from the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Ramirez had left once the snow started falling. “This Texas boy said it was time to go,” he drawled. But he had kept up with Zafra, and was now renting a room for $850 from Zafra’s cousin.

It’s affordable, given what they make, but wild compared with old Quincy. Over the past year, Douglas County, which includes East Wenatchee, had the greatest home price increases in the entire state. The median home price is $519,000, up 18% in just one year.

Stacie de Mestre, a director at a regional port authority, said the area was gripped in a housing crisis. “I know everybody says they have one,” she said, “but there is truly one here.”

As a teen, Zafra and his grandfather picked rocks out of the fields where data centers now stand. “When our family members would come up to work, you could find a whole house for, like, $600,” Zafra said. “Before the data centers.”

He checked off the gigs he’d had so far: “Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft. Maserati. And then CyrusOne.”

It’s been good to him. He eats his meals out — birria burritos from the IGA market’s deli counter, carne asada from Rich Tacos. “You see these wiremen driving these nice trucks?” he said. “I’m one of them.”

At the bar, one of the first journeymen he trained under, Nate Barrick, was sharing Coronas and shots with a guy who introduced himself as Texas Mike. Before becoming an electrician 16 years ago, Barrick installed lightning protection, worked as a valet and “sold a lot of drugs.” A friend persuaded him to sign up for an apprenticeship, and he forgot all about it. “They called me two months later,” he said, “and that’s all she wrote.”

At a gig in Omaha, Nebraska, he met a teacher online. “She quit and came with me, and she’s been subbing everywhere we go,” he said.

Around Thanksgiving 2022, Barrick had been working seven days a week at a data center in central Oregon until the project shut down overnight. He heard Quincy was hopping, and headed back to Washington. A year ago, they bought a house.

More jobs were posted while everyone ate their pizzas, and Barrick pulled up the union website. Microsoft had work in East Wenatchee. “So they want 10 guys,” he read. “For a year.”

Zafra said he’d had family priced out of Quincy.

“It’s sad, you know, but at the same time,” he said, “I’m part of the problem too, because I’m working on them.”

When Does the Electricity Run Out?

The data centers spew jobs during construction, Zafra argued, but they employ only several dozen workers once they are up and running.

His buddy Drew Lampe conceded that might be true, but saw no end to the building.

Zafra disagreed. “There is an end in sight,” he said.

“The grid’s maxed out,” Zafra said. “They can’t build with no power.”

Around here, power is the center of the rumor mill. Everything that can be dammed, already is, so they need more transmission and supply to keep growing.

There’s hope that Helion, a nuclear fusion startup that has a deal with Microsoft, may build its first substation at the Malaga site. Bob Allen, a union representative, heard that Quincy might get a new 500-megawatt transmission line from a federal power authority. “That would give us another 10 years of work,” he said.

In late September, word spread through break rooms that Microsoft had signed a deal to fire up the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, driving home how their fate was tied to electricity that was increasingly in short supply.

Building more power also requires more electricians. There’s a reason the IBEW runs recruitment ads during NFL games. The union is also expanding its apprenticeship program, which opened an East Wenatchee branch in 2022. But it needs enough work for apprentices to be trained on.

“We’re making a commitment — and I don’t have a crystal ball — to somebody for 8,000 hours, four or five years of their life,” said Rob Bartel, the program’s cautious director.

“I’ll sleep at night, way better, knowing there’s jobs,” he said.

Williams of Microsoft said the company had been sharing labor forecasts like never before, to give the union certainty that, “Hey, you know what, a few years down the road we’re still going to be building and we still need electricians.”

The union sees an opening to diversify: the children of apple pickers, women. Apprentices need a high school degree and a C in Algebra. In the current classes, most were in their late 20s or 30s. They previously worked building forklifts or as a repo man or selling cellphones.

They are paired up with seasoned electricians, each teaching their own personal tricks.

“You get those old-timers,” said Aleesa Zyph, a mother of four, “and they’re like, ‘Stop bending over to do that work! Your body will hate you.’”

On a Friday morning, Nickell and his wife, Becca, were hanging around their RV. They rented from a local couple — she wires data centers, he strings power lines — who installed two hookups in the yard of their rambler.

Growing up, Nickell’s parents did well building zip lines, but he cared only about pole vaulting. After high school, they kicked him out “for being a bum.” He slept on the mat at the gym. “My parents told me if I got a job, I could come back,” he said.

He recalled enjoying splicing together auxiliary cords to listen to a 1980s stereo, so he found work as a nonunion electrician. He coached at nights, and met Becca, who pole vaulted in college. He started taking jobs on the road and joined the union to make more money.

“It was culture shock to say the least,” Nickell said. Within three days of his first job site, someone peeled an IBEW sticker off his Toyota Tacoma. An older man from Oklahoma with a big beard and bib overalls explained why he should not drive a foreign vehicle. Now he has a Ford.

Over time, Nickell found his way, and community. He went to his first brotherhood night at a bar in Indiana, and learned the rules of the road: Put in eight hours of work for eight hours of pay, no more, no less. Do not be a pushover on safety, and do not do more than you’re paid for, lest you be considered “wormy.”

Over the summer, Nickell and his wife bought a two-bedroom mobile home off Facebook Marketplace for $145,000 near one of the dams. For now, they were renting the rooms out to traveling electricians for $600 a month.

They expected to hit the road again, and chase their bucket list of places to work. But they will not be gone long.

“Eventually, we’ll move our camper from here and go somewhere else,” Nickell said. “But, we’ll still have that to come back to.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.