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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Jowi Morales

Exploding number of AI data center build-outs delay Texas housing projects — data centers' high demand for electricians prices out contractors, homes now take two months longer to complete

Texas homes under construction.

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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