Workers Have a Secret Weapon Against the AI Build-Out
The AI build-out depends on gas turbines and power transformers made by a handful of workers at a handful of plants in the US South. That bottleneck is a vulnerability — and a rare opportunity for labor to exercise real power over the tech giants.
Any disruptions to production of gas turbines would have cascading and wide-ranging impacts, giving workers powerful leverage over the AI build-out. (Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“We’re really going into what we believe is the early chapters of an investment supercycle in the US for electricity growth,” Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, told Barron’s during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. “If you take a step back, we probably haven’t seen an analogous period of time like this since 1945.”
The AI build-out being undertaken at lightning speed is big business for companies like GE Vernova, which, along with Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, supply over 75 percent of the world’s gas turbines. GE Vernova’s equipment alone supplies 25 percent of the world’s electricity, and a staggering 55 percent in the United States. In the first quarter of this year, the company racked up $2.4 billion in sales related to orders for data centers, more than total sales for the previous year. Orders for gas turbines are booked out into 2030.
In February, Siemens Energy announced it was investing $1 billion to expand its production of grid equipment in response to soaring demand for electrification, including restarting production of gas turbines at a plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had stopped producing them in 2020.
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