Data centers provide computing power.

Can they power the local economy too?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

A few months ago, I spoke to William Martin.

He's a branch manager with the electrical contractor, Kelso Burnett, which is based in Chicago.

He told me of the hundred-plus years the company's been in business,

2024 was one of the busiest ever.

One reason they've been slammed?

There's a ton of work wiring new data centers.

As you can imagine, there's a lot of power needed for those projects. They eat up a lot of resources,

a lot of electricians. Data centers are filled with servers, basically a bunch of beefed up computers

stacked on top of each other in buildings that can be as big as warehouses. So they do need a lot

of electricity. And there

are more of those projects in the works. For example, META has said it's planning to build out

at least one data center that's going to be so big it could cover a good chunk of Manhattan.

I asked Wall Street Journal tech reporter Megan Brubowski, what kinds of companies are benefiting

from this data center construction boom? So there's this whole ecosystem, right?

So there's cables are another big part of this.

So electricians, there's plumbing aspects of us as well.

There's water that is used to cool the data centers, which these data centers get very hot.

And so to prevent them from overheating, you cool them with water. So then you have this

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