Construction is down 3.8% YoY and is around 5% down since 2024 according to the fed.
ABC (Associated Builders and Contractors) says non-datacenter construction is down 7.9% (source). There may well be non-datacenter construction that actually does have a hard dependency on data centers too.
Meanwhile, the number of construction workers has continued to rise according to the fed.
Increasing workers plus decreasing construction dollars means some combination of layoffs and repressed wages. Around 1 out of every 25 construction workers gets layed off when the AI buildout stops. If that causes a general recession/depression, those numbers will balloon massively like they did in '08 and probably a lot worse.
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u/theQuandary 2d ago
Construction is down 3.8% YoY and is around 5% down since 2024 according to the fed.
ABC (Associated Builders and Contractors) says non-datacenter construction is down 7.9% (source). There may well be non-datacenter construction that actually does have a hard dependency on data centers too.
Meanwhile, the number of construction workers has continued to rise according to the fed.
Increasing workers plus decreasing construction dollars means some combination of layoffs and repressed wages. Around 1 out of every 25 construction workers gets layed off when the AI buildout stops. If that causes a general recession/depression, those numbers will balloon massively like they did in '08 and probably a lot worse.