Power & Sites · United States

Aging workforce, immigration crackdown are depleting skilled workers

Credited to Stateline · stateline.org · 5h ago

A construction worker wields a hammer on the job at the Mill Creek Residential project in Paramus, N.J., in May 2026. The supply of skilled workers in construction and other trades is under pressure from aging, immigration enforcement and a rush to build data centers. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)

A perfect storm of harsh immigration enforcement, aging journeymen and a building boom for data centers is wreaking havoc on the nation’s supply of skilled trade workers.

Automakers and construction contractors say they need more access to workers through accelerated training, steady immigration and a cultural shift to encourage young people to do the hard, dirty work of skilled trades. They’re looking for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, machinists and technicians — specializations increasingly in short supply.

Worker shortages are the top reason for construction project delays, a September survey by the Association of General Contractors of America found. Applicants are there, but half of the contractors who were surveyed said too many job candidates are unqualified and need more training.

The association cited both the demand for workers building data centers and tougher immigration enforcement as contributing causes for the shortage.

“Over 50 percent of craft workers are born outside the United States. We don’t know that they’re illegal but frankly DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) is not being that discriminating in whom they pick up or who feels threatened by them,” said Ken Simonson, the chief economist for the Association of General Contractors of America. One answer is for the government to allow more worker visas for construction and other trades, he said.

“We’ve been stymied for 20 years or longer trying to get construction treated similarly to agriculture, where if you can demonstrate that there isn’t enough Americans interested in a job you can bring in somebody,” Simonson said.

Pay is rising for the skilled trades, but it’s hard to say how soon higher wages would attract more people. On social media, trades workers complain of long commutes to work sites, long waits through low-paid apprenticeships and a feeling they’re not valued as much as office workers.

“Getting up at 4am-5am. Driving 50 plus miles to random job sites. Obviously the dirty part which is construction sites and inhaling dust and dirt all day. Seeing people in corporate jobs in nice clothes while I’m dirty going on lunch break,” wrote a 30-year-old on a Reddit social media post in July, concluding that they should have finished a college chemistry degree.

Thousands agreed, including a 31-year-old tradesperson from Michigan who said top pay in their field, plumbing and HVAC, is attractive but that many make less than $70,000.

“Been in the trades since I was 16 and recently started going back to college,” the person wrote. “Everybody I know who chose a degree over an apprenticeship is starting to outpace me in life buying houses and having kids while we’re check to check and getting less healthy by the day. “

Today’s children could prosper in tomorrow’s shortage of young workers

These are the concerns employers have to address if they’re going to find enough workers to build homes, cars and data centers for artificial intelligence. Ford Motor Company and the Ad Council announced a publicity campaign to bring more young people into the trades, with a video declaring “millions of skilled trade jobs are waiting for people ready to do something, with great pay, job security and work you can take pride in.”

Ford and the alliance didn’t mention immigration enforcement as an issue, but the Association of General Contractors and an unrelated survey of roofers both mentioned it as a prominent factor in reducing the supply of skilled workers.

John Burns Real Estate and Consulting, an independent housing research company, reported that many of the roofers it surveyed earlier this year saw immigration enforcement as hurting their business.

“There are no American kids willing to install roofs in Central Texas,” said one roofing contractor in anonymous quotes published by the group.

“Tough immigration reform and not enough Americans to fill the void,” said another.

“A lot of these people have been deported. The next generation is complacent and does not want to do physical work,” said a Florida roofer.

Elizabeth LaJeunesse, vice president for building products research at John Burns, said the vehemence of responses about immigration was surprising.

“They used terms like ‘They’re hunting our workforce.’ They’re describing disappearing workers,” LaJeunesse said. “Most of these firms are pretty conservative, so this is a real phenomenon we’re picking up on, that level of concern over immigration enforcement.”

If Trump wants more deportations, he’ll need to target the construction industry

Duane Musser, vice president for government relations for the National Roofing Contractors Association, said the responses are typical of what he hears from members. Immigration as well as better trade education are critical to roofing, he said.

“Advocating for solutions to workforce shortages, including expanded career and technical education programs and bipartisan immigration reform, is a top priority,” Musser said.

The DHS told Stateline in an unattributed statement that “those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear” and that “we will continue to enforce our nation’s laws and remove illegal aliens from American communities.”

In September a Trump-appointed federal judge stayed a federal practice of entering construction sites without a warrant to investigate immigration status. One construction worker of Mexican descent in Alabama complained that he had been detained three times since 2025 despite showing a state driver’s license demonstrating that he was a citizen born in Florida.

Immigrant workers make up a majority of roofers, painters and stucco masons, according to a Stateline analysis last year.

The nation will need 1.7 million new skilled trade workers every year through 2035, according to a September report by Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, a trade group including Ford Motor Company, toolmakers and other businesses. Training programs produce just more than half the numbers needed, and only half of those who enroll in skilled training programs finish, the report found.

Nine states were identified by the alliance report as having high demand but low supply of skilled labor: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.

Florida ranks first for demand for skilled workers, but last for supply, with not enough new workers coming online as building in the state booms and current workers near retirement age. The state’s Association of General Contractors’ chapter hopes the advancements in workforce AI will drive more young adults into construction jobs since those can’t be replaced by chatbots.

You can’t hide lower skills in a trade, whereas middle management and white collar jobs are protected by the vagueness of the job.

Other states have the opposite issue: ranking high for new workers but low in demand for them, based on recent hiring and future projections.

In the top 10 for worker supply but bottom 10 for demand: Indiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

The alliance report suggested employers themselves need to help train future workers. The companies building data centers, in particular, want those tradespeople.

“America needs hundreds of thousands of electricians, welders and fiber technicians to build AI infrastructure,” said Dina Powell McCormick, president and vice chairman of Meta, in a statement, adding that the alliance is “paying for the training, removing the barriers that keep people from stepping into these careers, and guaranteeing a job at the end of it.”

Shoua Thao, 40, is straddling the line between trades and AI as a machinist in the computer-assisted manufacturing business known as CNC machining, which uses computer code to control production. The son of Hmong refugees in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, Thao is now experimenting with AI production techniques.

“Trades are the one career path that doesn’t lie,” he said. “You can’t hide lower skills in a trade, whereas middle management and white collar jobs are protected by the vagueness of the job.”

Eventually trades could become a more valued career path than college, Thao said, though he has been discouraged at times by low pay and long hours that take time away from family.

“I think it will be a slow process but eventually, sometime in the future, maybe my children’s future, trades will take over,”.Thao said.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

Power & SitesUnited States

How Carbon-Aware Scheduling Can Cut Data Center Emissions

Credited to Data Center Knowledge · datacenterknowledge.com5h ago

Useful

Aligning flexible workloads to cleaner hours and locations turns variability into measurable Scope 2 reductions.

Data centers are often described as having fixed carbon footprints tied to their size and grid mix. In practice, operators can lower emissions by aligning flexible workloads with periods and locations where electricity is cleaner.

This “carbon-aware” approach complements long-term renewable procurement and efficiency programs, creating a practical pathway to reduce Scope 2 emissions and to demonstrate progress toward 24/7 carbon-free energy objectives. It also helps address growing regulatory expectations and stakeholder scrutiny of digital infrastructure’s electricity demand.

What Is Carbon-Aware Computing?

Carbon-aware computing is the practice of scheduling compute-intensive but time-flexible tasks – such as data backups, batch analytics, AI model training, report generation, and non-urgent patching – during windows when grid carbon intensity is lower or when on-site renewable or stored energy is available.

Related: After the AI Rush, Can Data Centers Reclaim Sustainability?

The core idea is to compare the emissions profile of running a workload at one time or place versus another, and then choose execution options that minimize emissions within operational constraints.

How Carbon-Aware Scheduling Works

Electricity grids are dynamic. Solar production peaks during daylight, wind output varies seasonally and hourly, and some regions benefit from geothermal, hydro, or nuclear baseload. Grid conditions change by the hour based on demand, transmission constraints, and market dispatch. As a result, the emissions intensity of a kilowatt-hour can swing significantly across a single day.

Carbon-aware computing takes advantage of this variability by aligning flexible workloads with periods when low-carbon energy is most available. Operators assess which workloads can shift in time or location without violating service-level agreements (SLAs), latency requirements, data residency constraints, or change-control policies. The outcome is a set of scheduling policies that favor cleaner windows while maintaining service objectives. That way, compute-hungry tasks can run without forcing incremental demand at higher-emitting hours.

Implementation Realities: Data, Forecasts, and Constraints

The principles behind carbon-aware computing are simple enough. In a data center context, however, implementing carbon-aware strategies can be challenging for a few key reasons. Common hurdles include limited observability into tenant workloads (particularly in colocation facilities ), difficulty predicting workload power draw due to dynamic CPU/GPU utilization and I/O patterns, and uncertainty in renewable forecasts.

Related: Do Data Centers Cause Air Pollution? It Depends on Power.

Additionally, not all workloads are flexible. Mission-critical, latency-sensitive applications may be fixed in time and location.

A practical approach starts with cataloging workloads by flexibility class, power profile, and compliance constraints. From there, operators can pilot carbon-aware scheduling on clearly deferrable tasks.

What Operators Can Do Today

Effective carbon-aware programs typically include:

Instrumentation and metering. Enhance power telemetry at the rack and cluster level to identify high-draw, schedulable workloads and measure realized emissions impacts.

Behind-the-meter resources. On-site renewables improve certainty that incremental workload energy is low-carbon. Generic utility grids typically can’t guarantee that the energy they supply comes from any particular source. However, data centers with their own solar, wind, or geothermal energy supplies can do this. When paired with batteries, operators can time-shift energy and shave peaks. While few sites can economically size batteries to cover full facility load, modest storage can be sufficient to power energy-intensive, deferrable tasks during clean windows.

Reduce Emissions, Keep Reliability

Perfect optimization is unrealistic for most data center environments. Even so, carbon-aware computing can deliver real reductions by capturing the “clean hours” that already exist on many grids. Over time, it becomes another reliability-minded tool – one that lowers emissions while respecting the operational realities that keep data centers running.

Related: Low-Frequency Noise and Data Centers: What to Know

About the Author

Christopher Tozzi is a technology analyst with subject matter expertise in cloud computing, application development, open source software, virtualization, containers and more. He also lectures at a major university in the Albany, New York, area. His book, “For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution,” was published by MIT Press.

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Power & Sites · United States

Built to power data centers at scale

Credited to Data Center Dynamics · datacenterdynamics.com · 6h ago

Photograph · Data Center Dynamics

How hyperscale data center operators can scale AI infrastructure with reliable power, advanced cooling and repeatable architectures for 1 GW deployments

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It also examines transitional AC/DC architectures and future 800VDC configurations designed to support the next generation of megawatt-class rack densities.