Workers in America are eyeing blue-collar trades—such as construction, plumbing, and steelwork—with new interest.
Even CEOs like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are on that list. Huang recently predicted that the next wave of six-figure jobs won’t come from Silicon Valley, but from the crews building the data centers powering it.
These jobs pay over $100,000, require no college degree, and are desperate for bodies: hundreds of thousands of electricians, laborers, and supervisors, with nowhere near enough people to fill the roles.
Skilled trades are already stretched thin, and the same shortage now competing for data center construction crews is one more strain on a housing industry that can’t build fast enough.
“The shrinking and aging construction labor force is a major issue in the homebuilding industry right now, leading to increased labor costs and longer construction timelines for new homes,” says Realtor.com® senior economist Joel Berner. “Where zoning may completely prevent some projects from being started, the labor shortage could prevent them from completed profitably and on time.”
So, the question becomes, can the country push its young workforce toward these jobs—and will housing markets feel the difference as workers potentially move from data centers to homes?
It depends who you ask.
The labor needs of data centers
Huang’s prediction is already playing out in paychecks. Workers moving into data center construction are seeing pay jumps of 25% to 30% over their previous jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes far more: An Ohio drywall contractor who took a supervisor role overseeing 200 workers at a data center site now makes over $100,000 a year, while an electrician managing crews across six sites in Northern Virginia tops $200,000.
Those wages are a function of scarcity. Data center construction starts approached $80 billion nationally in 2025, nearly triple the previous year’s figure, according to ConstructConnect. If this work is going to continue at pace, the industry will need more workers: The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation puts the sector’s worker shortage at roughly 439,000 people this year alone, specifically noting the lack of electricians, pipe layers, and HVAC techs.
And the buildout isn’t confined to a few tech hubs—much of the country is experiencing the data center boom. According to Realtor.com data, the share of U.S. home sales within 5 miles of a data center is ticking up rapidly, with low-income areas seeing a particularly high influx.
“Texas and Virginia are home to the most current and proposed data centers, but Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are close behind,” says Berner. “Pennsylvania and Ohio especially could benefit from an influx of tradespeople as their homebuilding levels are lower than the Southern states mentioned here.”
What makes data center wages climb so high is who’s paying for them: Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are spending billions of dollars on these projects. Homebuilders have no equivalent backer. They’re selling into what buyers can actually afford, on far thinner margins, which limits how far they can chase the same workers upward.
The question is, if data centers can pull tradespeople in with pay homebuilders can’t match, does any of that labor eventually flow back toward the country’s other, more urgent construction problem?
Will residential housing construction reap the benefits?
The optimistic case is straightforward: More tradespeople trained today means more tradespeople available to build homes tomorrow. The reality, according to the people who watch this labor market closely, is more tangled.
“Given such tepid residential demand, it’s a bit of a stretch to say that there is fierce competition today for skilled labor between data center and residential construction,” says Kathryn Thompson, founding partner and CEO of Thompson Research Group. Residential construction has been in its own three-year slump, she says, which means the two sectors aren’t yet fighting over the same workers — but that could change quickly if residential demand recovers.
Where the sectors do overlap, it’s narrower than the headlines suggest.
“A carpenter constructing a house would not make the switch to a data center project,” says Sean Plunkett, a home advisor and realtor with Triple Crown Homes, “but there could be competition among electrical contractors relied upon by homebuilders competing for the same limited pool of licensed electricians.” That competition shows up less in headline worker counts, he says, and more in how long a homebuilder waits on a single specialty subcontractor to become available.
Ryan Starr, a principal architect at Starr Designs & Architecture, sees a different risk. Large-scale data centers require concrete, cranes, and multi-ton building sections handled by specialized crews, he says, not the smaller, more improvisational teams that build single-family homes. Because most local contractors can’t handle a project that size, general contractors and their preferred subs typically arrive from out of town, creating a temporary population surge in the small communities hosting the buildout, then leaving again once construction wraps in three or four years.
“This kind of cyclical stress is not helpful,” Starr says. “It temporarily makes the housing issue much worse.”
Will these workers help America build?
Whatever the labor math ultimately shows, the housing shortage it might help solve isn’t waiting. The U.S. is short roughly 4 million homes, and builders added just 1.3 million last year, a gap the Realtor.com Housing Supply Gap Report says the country isn’t on pace to close. That urgency is the premise behind Let America Build, a campaign Realtor.com launched at SXSW this year alongside the National Association of Home Builders, pushing for lighter permitting rules and fewer zoning barriers to new construction.
The Realtor.com state report cards on affordability and home building show where that fight is furthest along, and where it overlaps with the data center boom. Texas remains the nation’s largest permit issuer by far, and several metros flagged among the top new-construction markets, including Austin, TX; Nashville, TN; and Raleigh and Charlotte, NC, are also seeing real data center investment nearby. But building a lot and building affordably aren’t the same thing: Arizona, another major data center market, earns only a middling affordability grade despite solid construction activity—a reminder that more permits don’t automatically mean more accessible homes.
Let America Build is pushing for more homes, faster. The data center boom is pulling for more electricians, plumbers, and equipment operators now. Whether those two efforts end up feeding each other may come down to a few key factors.
“I buy this long-term upside if the individuals who chase the high-paying data center jobs remain in their trade when the projects become less lucrative,” says Berner. “If the pipeline from data center electrician to home electrician is robust and delivers lots of talent, then this benefit may exist. If instead data center electricians chase other high-paying jobs later on instead of working on homes, the benefit to homebuilding could be minimal.”
The question, and problem, of timing
Plunkett, for his part, sees a real if distant payoff.
“In the long run, the boom could assist housing by convincing more people to enter apprenticeships and skilled-trade careers,” he says. “The problem is timing.” Training takes years to catch up to demand, but as it does, “the short-term competition for workers might eventually create a greater pool for homebuilding as well.”
Thompson is willing to bet on that pipeline paying off: “We expect there to be at least a few bumps in the road, but ultimately, this will benefit the residential end market.”
