AI and the labour market: data centres add blue-collar jobs as hiring weakens

The US economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on 7 August, a figure far below analysts' expectations and the first monthly decline since February. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%, but labour force participation fell to 61.4%, the lowest reading since February 2021, according to the same report. ZipRecruiter labour economist Nicole Bachaud told USA TODAY that "with job opportunities remaining scarce, more workers are exiting the labor market entirely."

That is the weak side of the ledger. The strong side is concrete, and it is being poured in Louisiana, Texas and Virginia.

CNBC reported on 26 September that welders, plumbers, HVAC technicians and electricians are in high demand for data centre buildouts, the physical layer under Anthropic, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI. Maria Flynn, president of the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, told CNBC that an apprentice-level technician can take home $40,000 to $60,000, with experienced electricians above $100,000. Bachaud said the mean minimum salary for data centre jobs rose 125.1% year over year to nearly $208,000, a figure she attributed to highly specialised engineering roles pulling the average up. Postings for welders and pipefitters are up 164% year over year, concentrated in places such as Houston and Birmingham.

Cushman & Wakefield research cited by CNBC estimates that every 100MW of new data centre development creates nearly 1,300 local jobs, about $110 million in annual wages and $344 million in gross output.

The politics are moving the other way. Gallup found 70% of Americans oppose a data centre in their local area; a New York Times/Siena poll this month put opposition at roughly two-thirds across parties. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a grid approval moratorium and a halt on new environmental permits. Data Center Watch counts at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed this year.

Meanwhile the entry-level door is narrowing in other sectors. Windows Central reported on 12 August that Xbox cut 3,200 jobs across 2026 and 2027, and that Turkish studios, once more than 800 at peak, have stopped hiring juniors as solo developers ship games with tools including Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. A university director in Turkey is telling students to build their own games rather than expect a junior role.

Public opinion on AI itself has flipped. Pew Research Center, in a survey of 3,488 US adults from 22 to 28 June published on 16 September, found 56% of Democrats more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, against about half of Republicans. Democrats are now more likely than Republicans to predict AI will mean fewer jobs over 20 years, 75% to 68%, a reversal from two years earlier. At the ideological edges the gap is wider: concern among liberal Democrats rose from 45% in 2023 to 63%, while it fell 14 points among conservative Republicans.

None of this settles whether AI destroys more work than it creates. It does show the effects arriving unevenly: a welder in Birmingham and a junior game developer in Ankara are living through the same boom.