EXCLUSIVE — Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram, announced Wednesday morning that it is entering into a first‑of‑its‑kind national partnership with North America’s Building Trades Unions, which represents 3 million construction workers. Now, the future of Meta’s AI data centers is tied to the men and women who build them.
This very unique moment is the culmination of the relationship between NABTU president Sean McGarvey and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick, the wife of Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA). McGarvey has spent much of his storied career earning long‑term labor commitments for his members. Powell McCormick framed the deal not as a one‑off construction contract, but as a long‑term commitment to the skilled trades.
McGarvey, who has navigated NABTU into areas such as large energy projects, LNG terminals, and new renewable infrastructure — areas that unions were often not part of — said that the memorandum of understanding with Meta is the next iteration of his long-term strategy.
“NABTU is proud to partner with Meta,” McGarvey said in the agreement. “The Future Is For Everyone Fund is exactly the kind of investment communities across America need and will value.”
The “Future Is For Everyone Fund” that McGarvey refers to is a newly announced billion‑dollar Meta initiative targeting the communities where the company owns and operates data centers. It is an initiative that binds one of the world’s most powerful digital corporations to the kind of institutions that are about as analog as it gets: Local unions, apprenticeship programs, and the people who swing hammers, run pipes, and pull wire.
“We look forward to working together to ensure the future of America is built by the men and women of America, all that’s needed is the workforce planning, industry partnerships, and sustained investment required to connect people with the jobs and family-sustaining careers,” McGarvey said.
Powell McCormick said she was equally ready to merge the future of American technology with the American worker. “We are so proud to work with NABTU on this partnership,” she said of working with McGarvey in the past few months.
“This is an important moment, and these men and women of the skilled trades are building the American infrastructure needed to ensure America’s values lead the AI race globally,” she added.
In an era when big tech companies often find themselves on the opposite side of the table from organized labor, Meta and NABTU are signing a formal agreement to do something different: build an intentional pipeline from union training centers and apprenticeship halls directly into the job sites where Meta is constructing and expanding its sprawling data centers.
The partnership is rooted in the challenge that our country does not have enough skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen. Industry groups estimate a nationwide shortfall of hundreds of thousands of electricians, fiber technicians, plumbers, welders, and construction workers who support building sites. And without them, AI infrastructure stagnates, and the communities that would benefit from them continue to decline.
McGarvey is a second‑generation union man from Philadelphia who came up the traditional way: through the apprenticeship ranks, through his local, through the bruising internal fights that mark any large union.
Over the past decade, he has quietly become one of the most influential figures in modern labor. Not because he is the loudest, but because he has played a long game. Sitting across from governors, presidents, oil executives, and now Silicon Valley titans, he asks the same question: If you’re going to build something big in America, why wouldn’t you build it with us?
For rank‑and‑file members who still remember plant closures, McGarvey is betting that in the age of AI, labor can become something else: a stable bridge between the newest sector of the economy and working with your hands.
Artificial intelligence is often described with futuristic, emotionless language: clouds and virtual assistants who live nowhere yet exist everywhere. But if you walk through one of those sites, you are more likely to hear the rasp of a saw or the crackle of a welding torch than the quiet click of a keyboard. Pipefitters route cooling systems that keep server racks from melting. Operating engineers move earth and steel. Electricians tie together miles of cable that carry the power and fiber that AI depends on.
By bankrolling apprenticeship pathways alongside union labor, Meta understands that you cannot build a high‑tech future on a hollowed‑out skilled-labor force. The AI revolution may change what work looks like in offices, but out on the job site, it is creating a different kind of revolution — one where complex, long‑duration projects demand a workforce that is trained for both old‑school craft and new‑school technology.
The new collaboration signals that the long‑running cultural divide between the knowledge economy and blue‑collar work is narrowing– at least on the construction site. The digital economy cannot exist without physical infrastructure, and that infrastructure cannot exist without a workforce that is trained, paid, and respected enough to keep doing the job.
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Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Meta Platforms, has staked his company’s future in the middle of the country, something we discussed several years ago in our interview.
The merging of the two opposite industries is something new. Tech companies move fast, stay light, and keep the workforce flexible, while the building trades unions are some of the country’s oldest institutions, built on apprenticeship, seniority, and contracts.
Under the broad outlines of the agreement, NABTU’s local affiliates will tailor apprenticeship and skills training to prepare workers for the specific demands of data center construction and maintenance: high‑voltage systems, sophisticated cooling and fire suppression, and secure fiber networks. In return, Meta commits to treating the building and expansion of its infrastructure as a long‑term partnership with organized labor, not a short‑term transaction.