As an electrician in training in Detroit, Tyler Shelton spends most of his days popping down manholes to fix cables and other electrical gear. But lately, his company has sent many of its workers to a sprawling data center that just broke ground about an hour away.

“Everybody wants that money,” Mr. Shelton, 29, said during lunch break at his apprenticeship’s twice-a-month classroom day. “We have work to do, but we’re also losing a good chunk of manpower to these data centers.”

Soon, he could join them: OpenAI’s project in Saline Township is the biggest single investment in Michigan’s history, according to the state, requiring hundreds of electricians working 10-hour days, seven days a week. Despite the overtime bonanza, Mr. Shelton has mixed feelings.

“I’d like to have a house in the next year or so,” he said. “So it’s like, I understand the draw, but I also like to have a life outside work.”

The data center boom is on everybody’s mind at the Detroit Electrical Industry Training Center, where about 850 apprentices train between long days on the job. The megaprojects are pulling skilled trade workers into remote locations with some of the highest pay and bonuses than the industry had ever seen.

The next generation of electricians is also top of mind for the artificial intelligence companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure they have enough people to build and run their data centers.

That commitment includes this training facility, which is one of 270 supported by a partnership between the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and contractors. As part of a $50 million program from Google, the group plans to boost annual apprenticeship enrollment to 30,000 from 19,500 for the next three years in locations selected by Google. Another grant from BlackRock, the asset manager, would widen training pipelines for its data centers in Texas, part of a $100 million effort to expand the skilled trades.

Tina Williams was hired to manage the grants, which are the alliance’s first from the private sector. She hopes the money strengthens the work force enough to meet demand from data centers without abandoning other clients, like Mr. Shelton’s employer.

“We want to bring in enough to fulfill the need for the data centers, while maintaining our core work in each of these locals,” she said.

Human-Built

There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functionally unlimited cash that are racing to supply skyrocketing demand for their A.I. models.

The explosion has offset flagging activity in other sectors, like office construction, which never recovered after the pandemic. Housing has been depressed by high interest rates, and offshore wind felled by political opposition. Still, competition for labor — never mind land and materials — is starting to weigh on other parts of the industry.

“There’s no question the resources are very limited, so decisions to build one thing kind of drag from another,” said Mario Iacobacci, who runs the construction and infrastructure advisory practice at Oxford Economics.

Developers are paying a premium for workers, especially in the rural areas where they are building data centers. According to an analysis by Indeed, the job listings website, hourly installation and maintenance jobs at data centers pay 42 percent more than similar jobs in other fields.

Behind that inflated pay is a bidding war. In markets with a lot of data center construction, like Dallas and Northern Virginia, workers can jump ship for bonuses or higher per diem rates. The competition has driven contractors to staffing services like Aerotek.

“It is creating a labor tension that is really delicate,” said Marty Schager, Aerotek’s director of data center market development. “You’ve got a passive job-seeker community out there right now that I think is looking to potentially capture opportunity with this once-in-a-generation data center gold rush.”

There is some precedent for tech companies to teach people to maintain their facilities. Microsoft started programs for data center technicians in 2018, and now operates 39 locations around the world that have trained 15,000 people.

But the A.I. era has drawn tech companies much further into the construction business. They’re working with community colleges and unions to design classes that can get people on site as quickly as possible, even if they keep learning on the job.

Tony Qorri is vice president for construction at DataBank, a data center developer and landlord. He spends a lot of time with his contractors to plan their work force strategy years into the future, asking them to forgo other jobs to staff his project if they can’t find and train enough workers.

“Even some folks that are graduating high school, these companies are going after them saying: ‘We’ve got to train you up — this is the way to make money,’” he said.

In one of the largest efforts, Meta, the social media giant, has allocated $115 million for the first year of what it says will be a multiyear commitment to train construction workers, starting with about 5,000 participants. They will complete a four-week training course, with travel and lodging paid for, then work on a site with one of Meta’s contractors.

The program is run partly by Associated Builders and Contractors, a nonunion trade association. It’s putting together a curriculum of basic construction skills tailored to data centers, hoping to keep projects on time and on budget.

“The initial goal is, ‘Hey, let’s get as many of these folks on the Meta sites as possible, keep them in the family,’” said Joel Thames, the association’s vice president for work force development. “If someone leaves and goes to another sector or goes to a contractor that’s not working on a Meta site, we all kind of agree that that’s OK.”

Sean McGarvey is the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, an alliance that represents three million workers. Its affiliates spend about $2.5 billion annually on apprenticeship programs and other continuing education, paid for by employers and union members. Mr. McGarvey said his group could train as many people as the A.I. giants needed, as long as they made an early commitment to hiring union workers.

OpenAI did that in March, promising to work with unions to staff its projects. Mr. McGarvey called Meta’s effort “a brilliant public relations move,” arguing that a month of training doesn’t measure up to a four-year apprenticeship that teaches a wide range of skills.

“Any investment in the industry is a good investment at the end of the day, but we’re talking about apples and oranges here,” he said.

An Eye on the Future

As the public grows wary of A.I.’s potential impact on white-collar jobs and the side effects of data centers on local communities — dramatized this week by a protest at President Trump’s appearance outside Detroit — splashy commitments to the skilled trades serve more than one purpose.

Meta blanketed Facebook and Instagram with advertisements for “America’s Workforce Academy.” It is also working with the National Urban League and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to spread the word.

Ramiro Cavazos, the chamber’s president, wants A.I. companies to hire more Hispanic contractors. Creating better relationships with local businesses, he said, could help smooth Meta’s path in skeptical locales.

“We’re hearing from our own communities and small businesses that really feel like there’s a disconnect,” Mr. Cavazos said. “Our role in supporting these companies is better than not having a role at all.”

Working with building trades unions also brings political backing. Anthony Abrantes, assistant executive secretary-treasurer for the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, says local unions typically endorse a project if they’re set to work on it. If not, they’ll sit out the debate. Like the offshore wind industry, which has withered in the face of intense opposition, data center developers need all the local credibility they can get.

“Those industries did a really bad job of stopping the rhetoric and educating communities,” Mr. Abrantes said. “It’s almost like we’re doing their advocacy and business development for them.”

Construction workers often have mixed feelings about data centers, too.

Starr Sciortino is in her second year of the electricians union’s apprenticeship training. She loves troubleshooting problems, and just started on General Motors’ major retrofit of its plant in Lake Orion. But she compares working on a data center to helping build a weapons factory.

“I don’t believe any type of money is worth sacrificing any resources that’s beneficial to communities,” said Ms. Sciortino, 22. “However long it lasts, is it really worth it in the end?”

The question looms over the apprentices who will become journeymen as the build-out reaches fever pitch. Fully trained electricians could shift to nuclear plants, apartment buildings or pharmaceutical factories. But it’s hard to imagine anything on the scale of what’s underway.

“The best-case scenario would be you train all these skilled workers up and right when the data centers start to become less popular is we’d have a housing boom,” said Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “That’s probably not likely.”

Joe Ottenbacher already switched careers, leaving early childhood education because of its bureaucracy and underfunding. He worries that an exodus of electricians from their $200,000-a-year data center jobs could depress wages for everybody else.

“If we have an influx of workers at this point with the data centers being built, what happens when they’re done? Where do those workers go?” he said. “How many people does it take to run a data center after taking up all this property and all this land that could have been used for something else?”