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.
More from Companies & People
- Creator Hopes X Payouts Will Cover a $500/Month AI Plan, Details Tomorrow — AIandDesign · 2026-09-25
- Measuring AI productivity by output volume alone may hurt the whole org — blaizedsouza · 2026-09-25
- ROSCon Global 2026 wraps up in Toronto, next stop Kraków in 2027 — kscottz · 2026-09-25
- Anthropic Reportedly Plans to Give Its Seven Co-founders Majority Voting Control Pre-IPO — kimmonismus · 2026-09-25
- Alexandr Wang runs AI product launches like creator drops, outpacing enterprise marketing — viksit · 2026-09-25
- Polymarket puts 16% odds on Anthropic announcing a full AI training pause this year — Polymarket · 2026-09-25