Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, EdgeConneX.
Every revolution is a story about people, and the race to build digital and AI infrastructure is no different. Behind the headlines about chips and power are human questions: Who benefits, who feels left behind and who will build it?
The Human Capital Gap
The AI era is built on concrete and conduit, and there simply aren’t enough skilled hands to make it happen.
According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, construction faced a shortage of roughly 439,000 workers as of November 2025. Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026 and another 456,000 in 2027, while the National Center for Construction Education and Research projects that about 41% of the workforce will retire by 2031.
The math is not mathing.
Electrical systems alone account for 45% to 70% of a data center build’s cost, according to International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and McKinsey estimates the country will need 130,000 additional electricians by 2030 to build data centers and new manufacturing facilities.
To meet AI demand, the data center industry has to grow the talent pool. Many potential beneficiaries do not know what data centers are or the careers they offer. The industry needs workers across more than 230 specialist roles, from construction trades and facilities technicians to engineers, controls specialists and network technicians. Some require a degree, but many call for a trade credential or equivalent hands-on experience.
Demand is growing faster than traditional education pipelines can produce skilled workers. In 2025, Google committed $10 million to the Electrical Training Alliance to help train more than 100,000 electricians and 30,000 new apprentices within five years.
The challenge is considerable, but not without precedent. In 1940, as skilled workers were drafted and war production surged, the War Manpower Commission created Training Within Industry, which broke complex jobs into teachable steps. By the end of the war, more than 1.6 million workers in 16,500 plants had been certified.
The lesson: Workforce gaps close when industry and educators treat training as critical infrastructure.
The Workforce Multiplier
The second half of the people story is opportunity. In Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Community College offers the state’s first accredited associate degree in data center operations. Microsoft partners with the college on scholarships and internships, and Amazon Web Services has teamed with Virginia’s community college system to expand similar programs statewide.
Virginia’s legislative watchdog, JLARC, found in 2024 that a single data center building puts roughly 1,500 workers on-site at construction peak, but sustains about 50 permanent jobs once running. Goldman Sachs Research reported that construction jobs tied to data center development have grown by 216,000 since 2022, and PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with AI skills now earn a 62% wage premium.
History suggests that as technologies mature, new opportunities emerge. When ATMs spread across American banking, economist James Bessen documented in the IMF’s Finance & Development that fewer tellers were needed per branch, yet banks opened more branches and teller employment held steady as the role evolved.
AI and other technology shifts are predicted to create a net 78 million new jobs worldwide by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum, and LinkedIn’s 2026 Jobs on the Rise ranked AI engineer as the fastest-growing U.S. role, with tech and AI-related jobs among the top five.
Workers in these roles are key to AI’s benefits, but none of that happens without data centers, and data centers do not happen without skilled workers.
The People Saying No
Then there are the people attending town halls to stop data center builds, and their concerns deserve to be understood rather than dismissed. A Gallup survey found seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing an AI data center in their local area. Shawn Patterson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center told Newsweek that opposition jumped from 49% to 61% between surveys. The Brookings Institution reports that local opposition blocked or delayed 75 projects worth $130 billion in early 2026.
Who are these opponents? Mostly ordinary neighbors. Patterson points to shared concerns across parties, including utility costs, privacy, children’s safety online and jobs. Stanford Law School’s Nathaniel Persily told Newsweek the data center has become the physical manifestation of AI, a proxy fight over technology people feel they never voted on.
Like the workforce challenge, opposition to new ways of working is not without precedent. Luddites protested automation in the 19th century, and Time warned of “The Automation Jobless” in 1961. The anxiety was not irrational; it eased when new livelihoods became visible and attainable.
The way through this fear is not a louder argument. It is a more inclusive, fact-based discussion that treats people closest to the build-out as neighbors, not obstacles. That means transparency, open training programs, verifiable community benefits and local hiring commitments that get kept.
No community ever learned to love infrastructure. People made peace with power lines, highways and factories when those things stopped being built near them and started being built with them. AI and digital infrastructure will earn its place the same way every transformative shift has: one neighbor and one kept promise at a time.
The Way Through
Workforce gaps close when we build fast, practical on-ramps like apprenticeships and community college programs. Creating pathways from classrooms to technology careers has been an EdgeConneX priority for years, including Hello World, which uses AI and VR in project-based computer science classes at the K-12 level. We are on track to reach more than 100,000 students across the U.S. by early 2027, with a goal of 1 million by 2030. That matters because students do not pursue fields they have never seen themselves in.
Positive momentum increases when local people can see benefits today and a brighter future ahead. Opposition softens not through better marketing, but through shared benefit, meaningful jobs locals can get and the promise of more time being human. The AI build-out will be won or lost not only in innovation, but in the meaningful building of human infrastructure.
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