Mike Rowe Reveals HUGE Salaries of Data Center Electricians: $260,000! Robby Soave | RISING

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:11]Good morning and welcome to Rising. We have a great show for you today. It is Thursday morning and I'm here with Lindsay. Hello. How are you?

[00:00:18]>> Good. I have a feeling it's going to be a good day today because the forecast said rain, now I'm seeing sunshine. So, >> Well, you're bright and colorful today.

[00:00:24]>> Oh, thank you so much.

[00:00:25]>> Actually, we're both kind of bright and colorful.

[00:00:27]>> Yeah, for you that's bright and colorful. Light blue. It's kind of like we match. No, I'm not going to start that again.

[00:00:31]>> You know how all movies now have no color and it's just gray and dark >> intentionally and I hate it. I was watching the trailer for the new Odyssey movie, the Christopher Nolan movie, which I'm really excited about. I'm rarely excited for new movies, but I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan >> and I want to love it and I hope it's great and I'm of course withholding judgment, but it looks so gray just like everything else.

[00:00:52]>> Um, a movie that's not gray that you should go see this weekend, The Devil Wears Prada, too.

[00:00:56]>> Why does everyone talking about that movie?

[00:00:58]>> It's colorful. It's fabulous. There's a lot to >> Let's see it when it's on Netflix or whatever.

[00:01:02]>> All right, let's get to your radar. I know it's not about that.

[00:01:04]>> No.

[00:01:05]>> All right. Well, in these tough economic times, there are still good paying jobs out there. And you don't even have to go massively into debt to get an otherwise nearly worthless college degree. To obtain them, all you do is go to trade school and get some apprentice work.

[00:01:21]According to Dirty Jobs Mike Row, you should consider becoming an electrician working on a data center. Yes, those much feared data centers that we're going to have to build if we want to remain internationally competitive. In recent interview on Fox News, row revealed that some electricians are making, are you ready for it? $260,000 a year. Watch this.

[00:01:43]>> Two things. U the electricians that I met most recently at a data center in Plano were making $260,000 a year. It's true they had no debt, but the most consequential component of that meeting was the fact that all three of them had been poached three times in the prior 18 months.

[00:02:07]That's what's going on in certain parts of the country in the electric game right now.

[00:02:14]>> Wow, those are eyepopping salaries.

[00:02:16]Perhaps they're not entirely representative. I did a little bit of research and yes, it looks to me like data center electricians who start studying out make closer to $50,000. But after being on the job for a bit, that figure can rise rapidly to 100,000. And if you work overtime or work in the areas of the country where your skill set is in highest demand, for instance, in Texas right now, well then that's how you get to that 200k figure. But at any rate, that's solid, well- paid work, and you don't have to go into debt and spend four years in a classroom to get it. For many Americans, that's a really good deal. And it speaks to a mistake we've made as a nation, or rather a mistake our government officials made on our behalf, to punish and disincentivize and demonize bluecollar work and to promote higher education at any cost. Go to college, take as much time as you need, spend your parents' money, and then take out loans, get a fancy degree in sociology or polyai. You'll make that money back when you get a job. An entire generation listened to this lie only to find out there are Starbucks baristas with master's degrees. That's what happens when the government tries to take tries to outplan the market. We created an unstable glut of liberal arts majors. Ro summarizes it well. When we put our thumb on the scale for one form of education, right, a university four-year degree, when we said that that was the best path for the most people, we implicitly suggested that anyone with the timmerity to embark upon a different path was indeed the proud owner of something secondass. That's when the wheels started to come off the bus. I can't believe it's been 16 years, but the chickens have come home to roost.

[00:04:00]>> Thankfully, it's coming back around and there's a dawning realization as AI threatens to erase entire categories of employment that skilled tradesmen will be in demand. In fact, there will be more need than ever for skilled laborers, for people who work with their hands to build the infrastructure that backs up AI because AI isn't going away.

[00:04:21]It's not coming at us slowly. It's here now and we do need to ramp up. I know a lot of people. I speak to them all the time. They have this intrinsic fear of the data centers. Maybe Americans will fear them less when they realize what an economic boon they're going to be.

[00:04:34]They're going to create stable, high-paying jobs for bluecollar workers.

[00:04:38]And that's a beautiful thing. All we have to do is ignore far-left enemies of progress like Senator Bernie Sanders who wants a moratorium on new data center construction. I guess now Bernie is the one waging a war on the working class because those are good jobs and he doesn't want anybody to have them. 260k.

[00:04:58]That's a nice >> Look, I think that you have a lot of valid points in your um radar because the Democrats certainly need to reconnect with the working class and there has been a very obvious to me as I watch even friends of mine take jobs at different places. Not to say Starbucks is a bad job, but they not at all.

[00:05:15]>> Yeah. they studied these these different curriculums in college and then didn't materialize in the way they wanted as we graduated in a poor economy and now here we are again in a poor economy. So that's not always the way forward after spending hundreds of thousands some of them with masters on college.

[00:05:30]>> Um but I don't think anyone is anti-elect electrician. I think that when they're asking for some governance over these data centers you're thinking about the people that work there, how the tax dollars are spent for building these things. um how people are paid um how the water is resourced because I know you and I have argued that it doesn't take up as much water as other things that we use on a daily basis but don't complain about. But it's a new addition to the water supply. We're talking about the costs of electricity going up in neighborhoods. So you're raising prices on a lot of people, raising taxes on a lot of folks. And some of these jobs, which I think you have to be really specific about the electrician work, yes, you can make up to 260K, let's say, if you're a foreman and you start to grow. But most of these jobs that you're talking about to build the data centers are not long-term.

[00:06:15]They're temporary freelance jobs that really high paid that go away. And I I can speak to this because I know that a lot of my partners' friends are from Bowmont, Texas, where it's a similar idea. Like if you're electrician or and you're building certain things like even GE plants, you might have six months of solid work. you're really high paid, but you might have six months of no work.

[00:06:33]And so you could take that $260,000 salary and cut it in half for six months and that's your salary for the year.

[00:06:39]Might be good if you're the fourman, but if you're on that 50k salary now, you made 25K for the whole year because there's no work again. And we know once these data centers are built, the staff is pretty lean because they're up to operating. You don't need a lot of like people who get their hands dirty in the actual data center making it work. So I don't think we should sell this dream that people are going to go making almost 300k uh for a lifetime. this is freelance work and you know it's very specific to Texas and other places that you referenced. Um, and I don't think it's only Democrats that have um a concern about these questions, right?

[00:07:10]There are Republicans that want to push back on some of this. And I think >> if they're asking about these questions, that's a good thing to ask about how this will raise taxes on folks in the area to ask about the energy costs that are going to be consumed naturally by the people that live in the vicinity.

[00:07:23]That's a >> Let me address some of those things. You keep saying raising taxes. No one in my view abs no one's taxes should be raised to pay for data centers. People's taxes should be lowered in order to accept the data centers. We should lower people's taxes. The cost of building the data center, let me be clear, should be paid for entirely by >> the companies, not by taxpayers. The land should be purchased from people who own it, not confiscated via eminent domain or anything like that, by people who want to sell.

[00:07:55]>> The water costs are they exist. They are lower than a lot of people expect them to be, but again, the companies should be the ones paying for it, not the taxpayers. The electricity costs are negligible as far as I can tell, and in fact maybe positive. The having a large um stable u u a a facility that uses a stable amount of electricity, a large amount of electricity might actually lower costs. If you if you track like the cost of electricity in areas based on where data centers have moved into, there's no evidence whatsoever they're causing the electricity prices to rise and some evidence they're actually lowering the electricity prices. Um so so that's mostly again these could be built in a way that would be bad, right?

[00:08:38]If they're taking them from taking people's land, if they're raising No, no, no. We don't want any of that. We're going to lower taxes for people. We want to compensate the people who live in there for it because we do need to build these things. And I don't know what Bernie Sanders is thinking like >> to have the to be a globally competitive country to prepare for the technological wave like the wave is coming. You can't >> pedal like you're swimming against the current here to say yeah we're just not going to have any more of these things.

[00:09:06]Do you want every time you get a little message that says you're about out of Gmail storage? Do you want to buy more space? You know what that why that is right? We need more of these things.

[00:09:14]Like we're an online country.

[00:09:16]>> I actually got that this week. It really grinded my gears. Yeah. Well, we're going to run out of storage phase until we build more data centers. And then the jobs might be >> uh sure temporary for some, but then you know these again these are young >> young people do who can do these who can be qualified to do these jobs. Yeah.

[00:09:32]Pick up go somewhere else and build they don't have >> okay don't blanket like a lot of electricians do that until retirement normally. So when you're talking about some of these jobs some of them like even the union in New York some people do these jobs all over Manhattan for their a whole lifetime a career and retire. that option is not available if you're working on data center to data center. He gave examples of employees being poached by other outlets. Yes, he gave a perfect scenario. I'm sure that happens. But talk about the frequency labor market.

[00:09:58]>> Okay. But there's also a level of >> the opt the other alternative to what you want to do is build rapidly is not to do nothing as far as regulation. I think we can have both. So when you hear Bernie Sanders say, "Okay, right now we don't have any you're saying any any example of taking up and raising energy costs, but in the future if we do, here's how we going to here's how we're going to solve that."

[00:10:19]>> But that's not what he said. He said no new data.

[00:10:21]>> But this is how bipartisan agreement works, right? We should have people on both sides of the aisle coming together to talk about what regulation will look like in the event as we continue to build because AI is a place we haven't been before. Also, there's a tax fairness issue I was reading about that a lot of data centers are negotiating like Meta and other people really low tax um abatement so that they can have really cheaply made facilities and everything and it's not matching up with the people that live there because it's taking away from local schools and governments to do their jobs, fix the roads, things that you hate getting away how what >> because taxes are being allocated towards these organizations. I mean these uh >> they shouldn't be getting >> but this is how it's happening. So they're getting tax breaks and also taxes are going elsewhere. So they're reallocating them to some of these data centers, which means that the schools are and places like that are t getting money taken away from them. So I don't think they have to pay any less in taxes than anyone else. I want everyone to >> So it's not only the payment, but it's also the allocation. So they're getting extreme tax breaks plus reallocated funds going towards building these things. And I think that >> I don't think that's what's happening. I think what you're saying is they're getting tax breaks and so then there's not as much tax.

[00:11:24]>> No, there's concern about it that public infrastructure costs are going to go up.

[00:11:27]>> Concerns. I don't know.

[00:11:28]>> So that's what regulation is for. prior to the issue happening, let's regulate.

[00:11:32]>> Well, I'm not disagreeing about there need obviously needs to be some regulation, but the left and some people on the right, they're just calling for they they we just won't build any of these things.

[00:11:41]>> That's what they're saying. It'll be illegal to build these things.

[00:11:44]>> Media giants like uh Meta and other social media giants are are lobbying government right now to get all the things that we want with no >> Well, thank goodness because they're lobbying people, some of whom want to shut down all progress immediately. We will build no new things.

[00:11:57]>> There's not like one option or the other. I think there's a middle ground here to grow >> and I'm for the middle option and also we're have >> criticizing the the again the left some people on the right too as say we should just stop building things and and continue to live in the stone age or something.

[00:12:14]>> Why would we do that?

[00:12:14]>> You didn't get your horse and buggy reference in this time.

[00:12:17]>> It's becoming more and more uh relevant as uh that's the world Bernie Sanders wants us to live in. One drawn by horse and carriage. Next up, Jeffrey Epstein's purported suicide note unsealed yesterday. A look inside coming up.

[00:12:29]We'll be right back.