Data centers stymie affordable housing, advocates say

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(The Center Square) – Home building associations are losing skilled trades workers to data center construction, advocates said.

As artificial intelligence data center expansion explodes across the country, technology executives have placed a greater emphasis on recruiting workers in the skilled trades. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted the next wave of six-figure jobs would come from tradespeople who help build datacenter infrastructure.

"Everybody should be able to make a great living," Huang said. "You don't need to have a PhD in computer science to do so."

However, Ed Brady, CEO of the Home Builders Institute at the National Association of Home Builders, said the investment in skilled trades is not the full picture. He told The Center Square skilled trades jobs have been declining for over a decade and data center construction is only exacerbating the problem.

Brady estimates the skilled trades industry is short 300,000 skilled workers and the few that are available have gone toward data centers. He said five tradespeople retire from the field for every two that enter.

“The market is not as strong, and so today many of those people that were in housing are going to these data centers,” Brady said.

Brady emphasized that investments from data center executives are only short term while while worker shortages in homebuilding have been mounting since at least the 2007 financial crisis. He said the housing market is cyclical, but pointed out concerns that data centers would leave home construction at a loss due to high demand.

“This problem is going to get even more and more exaggerated and acute to the housing industry because of the data center construction, and we're not putting enough money into training the future generations of skilled labor,” Brady said.

Skilled trades workers moving into data center construction are seeing pay jumps of 25% to 30%, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimates the sector’s worker shortage is around 439,000 in 2026 alone.

Brady acknowledged that scarcity in the skilled trades sector has already led to increasingly competitive wages. However, he said technology companies like Meta, Amazon and Google have inflated prices as part of a push to recruit more workers.

“They're putting dollars into training skilled trades because they need the infrastructure, they need energy, they need water, they need buildings, they need infrastructure,” Brady said.

Brady is optimistic workers who joined the data center boom will return to the homebuilding sector. However, he called on government and industry leaders to invest in infrastructure to support skilled trade workers.

He said the Trump administration’s efforts to incentivize apprenticeship programs are a step in the right direction but do not make up enough of the trade workforce to have a meaningful effect. Brady called on Congress to appropriate funds for programs with long-lasting impacts on the workforce.

Brady pointed to the ROAD to Housing Act, which put restrictions on institutional investors from purchasing single family homes. He said the legislation was good policy in practice but did not fund jobs or other opportunities for affordable housing.

“Congress could play a role in incentivizing through taxes through incentives of many different items,” Brady said. “State legislatures and municipalities, big cities, they have to take the appropriate actions to provide policy and legislation.”