Analysis. On 28 September the American Infrastructure Alliance launched in Washington, describing itself in its own announcement as “the first nationwide coalition of labor and business focused on establishing responsible, enforceable guardrails for data center development at the state and local level.”
Read the membership list and the strategy announces itself.
On the labour side: the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Association of Iron Workers, the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters, the sheet metal workers’ SMART, the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers, plus the Ohio State Building & Construction Trades Council and ACT Ohio. On the business side: QTS, SoftBank, SB Energy, OpenAI, Blackstone, CoreWeave, Prologis, Skybox, Rowan, American Real Estate Partners and its data centre platform PowerHouse Data Centers, Related Digital, and Digital Realty.
Every labour organisation in that list is a building-trades body: five craft internationals, a state building-trades council, and the council’s own Ohio research and advocacy arm. Several of them reach well beyond construction — the IBEW also represents utility, telecoms and broadcasting members, and SMART took in rail and transit workers when the Sheet Metal Workers merged with the United Transportation Union — but the crafts they are bringing to this fight are the ones that wire, weld, plumb and insulate a building while it is going up. That is the tell, and it is why this is a construction story rather than an AI-policy story.
Why This Lands Here
In July we argued that the binding constraint on the AI infrastructure buildout was turning out to be permission rather than power, after New York’s Executive Order 62 froze state environmental permitting for data centres of 50 megawatts and up and an equipment analyst cut Caterpillar fifteen days later, naming the order. In August we followed that through Texas, where Governor Abbott ordered an audit of every data centre in the ERCOT interconnection queue and no project was to advance until it finished.
The open question we left was what the industry would do once it understood the constraint. This is the answer, and it is a more sophisticated answer than “sue.”
The coalition is not asking for permission to be granted. It is offering to write the rules under which permission would be granted — and it is doing so with organised labour standing in front of the capital. The alliance says its work “will begin ahead of and continue through the 2027 state legislative sessions,” which is the timeline of a legislative campaign rather than a public-relations exercise.
The Five Planks
The release commits the alliance to supporting state policies and standards that, in its own words:
- “Protect water and local resources” — “transparent, binding commitments to water stewardship and infrastructure.”
- “Require projects to pay their own way” — developers and operators “should pay for the energy and infrastructure needed, protecting households, ratepayers, and local communities from added costs.”
- “Create good jobs and long-term workforce opportunities.”
- “Deliver visible local benefits” — schools, roads, community infrastructure.
- “Ensure operators are accountable” — “clear, binding standards and oversight.”
Notice what the first two concede. Water commitments and “pay their own way” are not industry asks; they are the substance of what moratorium campaigns have been demanding. The alliance has adopted most of its opponents’ platform and kept one thing off the table — the pause itself.
That is the entire design. Kenneth Cooper, IBEW international president, puts the exclusion plainly: “Blanket bans on necessary infrastructure projects would set back our economy and threaten good middle-class jobs.” A coalition that accepts binding water rules, cost allocation to operators and community benefit requirements has very little left to argue about except timing — and timing is the only thing it actually needs.
The Trades’ Own Case
The union quotes in the release are not decoration, and two of them do real work.
Michael Coleman, SMART’s general president, frames data centres against industrial decline: “At a time when much of America’s traditional manufacturing base is under pressure, data center development represents a critical opportunity for the U.S. to lead by building, investing, and creating skilled, high-paying jobs here at home. American workers and communities should have a seat at the table as this critical infrastructure is built.”
Mark McManus, general president of the United Association, goes at the water question directly — which is shrewd, because water is where data centres are most vulnerable locally and the plumbers and pipefitters are the trade with standing to speak about it. “For more than 137 years, the men and women of the United Association have protected our most precious resource: water,” he says, adding that UA members “have built, maintained, and powered the data centers that enable daily life as we know it” and that “we cannot settle for anything less than the highest standards of quality and safety.”
Tag Greason, co-CEO of QTS, supplies the industry half: “Responsible growth requires clear expectations for everyone involved. Communities should have confidence that new development will be accompanied by transparent commitments regarding resource use, infrastructure investment, economic opportunity, and community benefits.” He also previews the next document to watch — “In the coming weeks, AIA will release a set of principles that can serve as a practical starting point for policymakers, industry leaders, workers, and local stakeholders.”
Worth noting as a structural fact rather than a criticism: Blackstone acquired QTS in a $10 billion transaction announced in June 2021, taking it private. The coalition therefore contains both a major data centre operator and its owner, which tells you how concentrated the interest behind it is.
What the Release Does Not Say
The announcement gives no budget. That silence is the release’s, not the record’s: a spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the alliance is a “high eight-figure campaign” while declining to disclose specific spending, adding that “more expansive guidelines are forthcoming.” Axios broke the story the same day and characterised the coalition as multimillion-dollar, as The Next Web’s write-up of that scoop records.
A high eight-figure state-legislative campaign is a serious number for an industry trade effort — on our reading, closer to the scale of a ballot-measure fight than of a standards-drafting exercise, though that comparison is ours and not something either the alliance or its critics have put a figure on.
The release also publishes no polling figures, though it rests its approach on polling: “AIA’s approach is grounded in its own polling across key states, which shows support for data center development shifting from deep skepticism to clear majority support, once enforceable guardrails are proposed and detailed.”
The numbers behind that sentence surfaced elsewhere. Per the Daily Caller News Foundation, a poll of 800 registered Ohio voters conducted in August for the Infrastructure Alliance of Ohio found 67% viewed data centres unfavourably against 18% favourably, and 74% opposed building one near their community — but support rose to 60% when respondents were told operators would cover the full cost of their infrastructure, create jobs, generate tax revenue and protect electricity bills. (Whose poll it is depends on who is describing it: the Daily Caller News Foundation attributes it to the Infrastructure Alliance of Ohio, an AIA state affiliate, while Axios and the coverage downstream of it call the same numbers the coalition’s own polling. Either way Ohio is the only state whose figures have surfaced — we have not found the cross-state data the release refers to published anywhere.)
Those four numbers are the coalition’s entire theory of the case. Opposition to data centres is not fixed — it is conditional, and the condition is cost allocation. If that holds, the rational move for the industry is precisely what it has just done: concede the conditions in writing, loudly, early, and in the company of people who build things.
The Other Side
The opposition is organised too, and it is not persuaded.
Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation at Food & Water Watch — which has called for a nationwide moratorium — told the Daily Caller News Foundation that data centre construction jobs are “transitory and fleeting,” and that “once centers are constructed, very few jobs remain in the facilities themselves.” The group’s research, he said, found “only 23,000 people working permanently in data centers across the country” as of 2024. On the alliance’s central offer he is unmoved: requiring the industry to pay its own way would not address noise, air pollution, water contamination or farmland loss, and “the point of a moratorium is to allow for rigorous study to determine if this industry can ever be regulated safely.”
The permanent-jobs point is the one the coalition cannot easily answer, and neither side’s published material engages with it directly. The building trades’ interest is in the construction phase, which is real, well-paid and finite by definition. That is not a contradiction in the unions’ position — a two-year electrical package is a genuine thing to fight for — but it does mean labour and the operators want the same outcome for different durations.
The wider policy backdrop, also per the Daily Caller’s account: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced legislation in March for an immediate federal moratorium on AI data centres pending national safeguards; more than 500 groups across 47 states called in June for a nationwide moratorium; and Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro — one of the alliance’s seven target states — signed an executive order in August tightening data centre development rules.
What to Watch
The alliance’s seven key operating states are Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina, with efforts “led by local initiatives” and the possibility of further expansion. The release is explicit that it is “not focused on the upcoming election.”
Three things will tell us whether this works. The principles document Greason promised within weeks, which will show how binding “binding” turns out to be when written down. Whether the 2027 sessions in any of those seven states produce a statute that looks like the five planks — a standards regime, rather than either a pause or a free hand. And whether the trades stay in the coalition once the first state asks for concessions that cost the operators money.
For contractors and equipment makers the calculation is simpler than the politics. The constraint we identified in July has not gone away; it has acquired a well-funded counterparty. The projects that move in 2027 will be the ones in states that wrote rules, and the firms positioned for them will be the ones that read the rulebook while it was still being drafted.
