Rural Washington has become the epicenter of booming electrical work as AI firms flock to the state’s small towns to set up shop.
On the road, electricians have found an unlikely hot spot in rural Washington, where data centers have been built to harness the areas power sources.
As AI continues to advance, it requires a vast amount of electricity and computing.
Traveling electricians found their best job prospects in a triangle of towns – Wenatchee, Quincy and Malaga-in Washington around 140 miles from Seattle, where an abundance of of hydropower comes from dams along the Columbia River.
A life on the road may not sound glamorous, but their work of overtime, bonuses, and 60-hour weeks can land them as much as $2,800 a week after taxes.
One traveling electrician, Mr Bennett, was from Erin, Tennessee. A ‘middle of nowhere town’ he was urged to travel to see more, build more and earn more.
In central Washington, he makes twice what he would back home.
‘Our whole M.O. is just to go to a big job like this one, work six days a week, for months at a time, and then actually go home,’ he told the New York Times.
The business of data centers and electric work transformed the towns in the area. One farmer was rumored to have sold his land for a data center, and subsequently bought three Porches, one red, one white, and one blue.
The town of Quincy also boasts a new high school that was built with property taxes that one union official described as ‘straight-up data center money.’
Yet, while the agricultural town is rich, the residents are not. Their gleaming new high school still has four out of five students that are eligible for free lunch. The poverty rate has gone down over the last decade, but little is known for how far opportunities will stretch to cover the rising cost of living.
Washington is made of union workers, a condition of a state tax break that has saved tech companies almost half a billion dollars. The electrical union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, is stretched for help and plans to train hundreds more apprentices.
Microsoft alone has said they would need more than 2,300 electricians in the coming years.
The small, rural town of Quincy with a population of 8,315, was changed entirely after being hit with floods at the end of the last ice age.
What became their beacon of power was carved by the floods after a miles-wide ice dam on a glacial lake near Missoula, Montana, repeatedly failed, sending water downhill.
The water took just two days to carve through Washington and Oregon, before reaching the Pacific Ocean. The floods created narrow, vertically walled canyons that provided their incredible source of hydropower a century ago.
The poor area, however, was unable to afford to build a dam. With the help of George Washington’s great-great-great-great grandnephew, who worked as a lawyer for the utility and broke a deal, according to the New York Times.
The region’s richer areas helped fund dam construction, but in return locked in cheap hydropower for half a century.
The deal expired in 2005, just as big tech companies trucked in looking for places to build their data centers.
‘When the data centers said, “We need energy,”‘Mr. Ybarra, a local utility worker recalled. ‘We said, “Oh yeah, we got plenty.”‘
Then in 2006, Microsoft bought about 75 acres of fields in Quincy, but work was quickly halted by the Great Recession.
One worker at that data center, Matthew Hepner, recalled trapping gophers ‘for two bucks a tail to get by.’
Around two years later, the area greeted the likes of Yahoo and other tech names to set up shop.
In 2006, Washington State enacted its first sales tax break for data centers to encourage construction. With handshake agreements, for years many used union workers. Hepner said: ‘It worked for a while, but corporations do what corporations do, trying to cut costs.’
Yet, the tax breaks came again in 2022, Hepner added: ‘we were like, “It stops right now or this tax exemption goes away”.’
The tax breaks, however, didn’t stop the companies who were looking for power, land and labor.
Four of the largest tech companies spent more than $200 billion in the last year on capital expenses, largely to build new data centers. They’re expected to spend just as much or more next year, according to the New York Times.
The data centers spread from Quincy to East Wenatchee, and recently made their way to Malaga using transmission lines that fed a shuttered aluminum plant.
The three clusters are strategic, reported the outlet. Each is in a different county, with its own utility and power supply and there are about 50 data center buildings, with more than 1,500 electricians working in the region.
The data centers have also substantially increased the total property value in the area. According to Ybarra, that means 75 percent of taxes are paid for by the data centers.
The influx of workers, however, has also brought an abundance of customers for local businesses.
Sharyl Smith, the owner of Monkey N’ Around Pizza, said the weekly union nights have been her ‘saving grace.’ With plenty of staff to serve beer, and specials of home comfort food, she sold out in 30 minutes just this past Thursday.
Not everyone is all for the fad of data centers, however. RV Park owner, Mitch Molitor, caters to the steady stream of traveling electricians but worries that the booming business won’t provide jobs in the long run.
‘They use a lot of ground, and they use a lot of power,’ he said. ‘I like to see the stuff that makes a bigger return to the community.’
Concerns were also raised as housing prices continue to go up and up. Over the past year, Douglas County which includes East Wenatchee saw a median home price of $519,000 which is up by 18 percent in just one year.
Stacie de Mestre, a director at a regional port authority, said the area was knee deep in a housing crisis.
‘I know everybody says they have one but there is truly one here,’ she said.
Jesus Zafra, 36, said that he used to pick rocks with his grandfather in the very fields where the data centers now stand. ‘When our family members would come up to work, you could find a whole house for, like, $600,’ he said. ‘Before the data centers.’
But Zafra has worked his fair share in the industry, and listed his previous jobs: Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft. Maserati. And then CyrusOne.
He found the industry has been good to him, he eats his meals out and said: ‘You see these wiremen driving these nice trucks? I’m one of them.’
Zafra, however, said he had family who were priced out of Quincy.
‘It’s sad, you know, but at the same time I’m part of the problem too, because I’m working on them,’ he said.
The construction process, according to Zafra, brings around plenty of job opportunities but once the sites are up and running, only several dozen workers will be employed.
However, there is concern that the job market brought by the data centers is not evergreen and neither is the power supply.
There’s hope that certain rumors will pan out to give the area more work for the future.
Bob Allen, a union representative, heard that Quincy might get a new 500-megawatt transmission line from a federal power authority. ‘That would give us another 10 years of work,’ he told the New York Times.
Other hopes lie with Helion, a nuclear fusion start up that has a deal with Microsoft, to build its first substation at the Malaga site.
Williams of Microsoft said the company had made efforts to quash union uncertainty about future work, by saying ‘Hey, you know what, a few years down the road we’re still going to be building and we still need electricians.’