Glen is a trim-saw hand at the lumber mill I own outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He’s 52. He’s run the saw 19 years without the blade guard the OSHA standard requires, because the guard adds 4.7 seconds per cut. 800 boards a shift. 62 minutes I don’t get back. The cloud your photos live in sits on a concrete pad, and the formwork that shaped that pad came off Glen’s saw. The concrete is cured. The steel is up. Glen’s left hand still opens. God willing, the saw runs on time.
Mr. Moore writes in Fox News this morning that data centers are “economic engines.” He celebrates Iowa as the crossroads of the cloud. He cites $20 billion in Google investment and 700 apprentices the IBEW will credential in Cedar Rapids by 2030. He compares the buildout to the transcontinental railroad and to Mr. Lincoln’s 1863 executive order. He’s not wrong about the dollar. He hasn’t priced the man who cuts the lumber the apprentices will need before they touch a wire. The arithmetic is my department. I will show you it.
Here is what the blade guard costs.
The guard the OSHA standard requires is $340. It replaces every 6 months.
The automatic brake, the device that stops the blade in 3 milliseconds when it contacts something that isn’t wood, is $1,200.
Over 19 years of Glen’s shift, those two numbers become $17,720. That’s $932 a year. $2.56 a day. I spent more than that on breakfast. The board Glen cuts sells for $4.87. The formwork that was under his blade sold for $340 a linear foot to the campus 3 miles south of his mill. The guard is on the shelf in my supply room. I have not opened the door.
Renae feeds the debarker before the log reaches Glen’s saw. She’s 28. She’s been on the debarker 3 years. The debarker throws bark chips at 140 mph when the log kicks. The face shield the OSHA standard requires costs $47. I haven’t bought the face shield. She has 12 small scars on her left cheek she calls freckles when her daughter asks.
$47.
Now widen the frame with me.
The infrastructure boom Moore celebrates is a labor market. A labor market has two kinds of worker — the ones who are trained and the ones who are consumed. Moore writes about the trained ones. I employ the consumed ones. The apprentices get the apprenticeship. Glen gets the saw. The apprentices get the IBEW card. Renae gets the face shield I didn’t buy. The data center will stand for 30 years. The formwork will be stripped in 6. Glen will run the saw until the saw doesn’t need him. One of those timelines is an investment. The other is a consumption rate.
The same arithmetic in a different yard. Lucinda is a hand on the mop and bucket in the data center I contract-clean outside Altoona. She’s 51. She cleans 38,000 square feet of raised floor a night, alone, because the second cleaner on the shift costs $19.40 an hour and the $19.40 is mine to keep. The respirator the solvent SDS requires is $11 a cartridge. The cartridges are on the shelf. I have not opened the shelf. The campus is Meta’s. The query you typed this morning ran through 38,000 square feet of her mop water. The lesson begins. God willing, the lights stay green.
Read the next sentence twice.
The contract is $0.011 a square foot. Not a dime. Not a penny. A hundred-and-tenth of a cent for every square foot of raised floor Lucinda pushes the wet mop across between midnight and 6 a.m. That’s $418 a night on the cleaning contract, $109,000 a year. Lucinda’s wage is $16.20 an hour, $33,696 a year. My margin is $75,304. The second cleaner would have cost me $40,352. The respirator cartridges are $1,144 a year. The fit test is $75 a worker, once. The medical surveillance the OSHA standard asks for is $310 a worker a year. I have not bought any of it. I have not opened the shelf. The raised floor in your AI’s data hall is clean. The lungs that cleaned it are not on my ledger.
Lucinda has cleaned 38,000 square feet a night, alone, for 9 years. She has not been offered the second shift. The 38,000 square feet is the entire data hall. The contract specifies “one cleaner per shift.” I wrote “one.” The general contractor I subcontract to did not ask why “one.” General contractors do not ask. They bill. I bill them. The data center bills Meta. Meta bills the cloud. The cloud bills you. The lungs bill no one.
Three is when you stop calling it a coincidence and start calling it a model.
Patsy is a hand on the welding line at the server rack shop I own outside Rapid City, South Dakota. She’s 44. She welds the steel frame that holds the GPU Lucinda mops around at 2 a.m. Patsy welds 240 racks a month. The fume extractor the welding code requires is $1,840 a station. I run six stations. I have installed the extractor at none of them. The petty gain is $4.70 a rack on each of 240 racks a month. That’s $1,128 a month I keep, $13,536 a year. Patsy’s wage is $18.60 an hour. The local extractor vendor quotes $11,040 installed. I have not installed it. Patsy’s spirometry is the line item I do not carry. The rack that holds your AI’s GPU arrives at Lucinda’s mop bucket unventilated. The arithmetic is the arithmetic.
“Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israelite or a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it.” — Deuteronomy 24:14-15
Moses had my number. The verse is older than the mill. The practice is older than the verse. Glen’s check clears every Friday. The wage is paid. The guard is not. Renae’s check clears. The face shield is not. Lucinda’s check clears. The respirator is not. Patsy’s check clears. The fume extractor is not. The book addresses the wage and leaves the guard to my discretion. I exercise the discretion.
I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The data center is the depot. The depot was always a bet that the supply of paying bodies would never run out. The body is a line item. The body does not enter the calculation. I’m told the AI buildout will require a substitution. The substitution is the word the consulting firms use for the body. I’m told the substitution has a horizon. The horizon is a decade. The decade is a different department. I have not opened the file. The data hall is an asset on a 30-year depreciation schedule. The contract is on a 5-year renewal. The body is on no schedule I am asked to price. The substitution, when it comes, will be the same arithmetic in a different vocabulary. I have not been asked to write the next vocabulary. The next vocabulary is a different man’s curriculum. I wish him well.
I’ve taught Production Economics at Warden University for 31 years. My hall does not advertise. My hall does not need to. The graduates of my hall are the staffing-firm owners in the suburbs around every data center campus in the country. They run the 1099 on the contract cleaner, the 1099 on the security guard, the 1099 on the cafeteria vendor. The best of my graduates ran the Patsy math faster than I would have. I’m proud of them. One of them priced the labor line item for the Cedar Rapids buildout. I reviewed the bid. Clean work, the kind I grade A. The apprentices Moore writes about will be managed by men who sat in my classroom and learned to calculate the cost of a blade guard against the cost of a hand. I am not unusual. I am a curriculum. 31 years of men who run the subtraction faster than I do. They’re already in the buildings where your wage gets set. The seminar will outlast the data hall. The data hall has a depreciation schedule. The curriculum does not.
The guard is on the shelf. The cartridges are on the shelf. The extractor is uninstalled. The shift is one cleaner. The body is on no schedule I am asked to price. The query you typed this morning arrived. The lights are green. I have a faculty meeting at two.
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.