AI data center talent war: electrician pay up 3-5x in Texas and Louisiana, says SemiAnalysis

johncoogan · x · 2026-09-25

Jordan Nanos, lead of SemiAnalysis' ClusterMAX, describes the neocloud talent wars on TBPN.

The shortage spans the entire supply chain: electricians, data center technicians, and operators. Electrician salaries in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas are up 3x to 5x.
Companies like Crusoe are paying far more to poach workers, but the industry is still out of people — training pipelines are the bottleneck for every role.
The most successful neoclouds build pipelines to convert talent from adjacent fields, e.g. moving software engineers into SRE roles for day-2 operations.

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