Data center construction hit $50B this year, and it's split America's unions into two camps that don't agree on anything

Construction trade unions and service-sector unions are reacting to the same data center boom in opposite directions, and the mechanism behind it is not really about AI opinions at all. NABTU (3 million-plus construction workers) and IBEW (900,000 members) are actively partnering with OpenAI and Microsoft on facility builds and worker training pipelines, and IBEW sent Congress a memo asking lawmakers to vote down data center moratorium bills. Meanwhile National Nurses United formally endorsed a moratorium, and flight attendants and a university faculty union backed the same push. Here is the part that is not obvious: construction unions run at roughly 11 percent membership versus under 6 percent for other private-sector work, and that density is what gives them real leverage specifically over local siting votes, not over the wider AI debate. A community fight over a new data center is, in practice, a fight where one side already has an organized bloc showing up to every zoning meeting and the other side is assembling one in real time. Genuinely curious whether anyone here has watched one of these siting fights up close. Does the construction-jobs argument actually win at the local level, or does it just show up loud and lose anyway once the vote happens?