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Comment by ryanmcbride | Hacker News Reader

There is frequently wood in buildings yes

Homes, not these buildings. Wood's a liability when it comes to fire suppression.

> Homes, not these buildings.

I would bet that there is a ton of wood in these buildings that they are hiring thousands of carpenters for. They are not hiring carpenters to entertain the electricians.

My grandpa was a card-carrying union carpenter. But all I remember is him doing general labor... all the actual carpentry jobs were gone before I was born, and I hit the half-century mark myself a few years ago. He worked with concrete and steel alot. I'd seen him put up cinder block too, picked that up somewhere I guess. And this was in the 1980s.

I'd take your bet, while trying to hustle you to raise the wager.

Everything I'm finding is showing the opposite with the exception of Microsoft experimenting with timber datacenters. Just looking at photos of DCs under construction shows they're all steel and concrete.

There is zero wood in a data center (or commercial building in general) excluding doors, millwork, and fire-rated plywood for mounting equipment on. It’s simply not allowed.

Data center are tip-up warehouses with walls made of reinforced concrete, metal bar joists, metal columns, and metal roofs. Any interior wall framing is made of steel.

So there is wood.

Zero wood except all the things that are made of wood, got it.

All of that stuff is probably 0.01% of the building, by volume/weight/cost/labor or any metric you care to choose. The structure itself has zero wood in it.

Trim, cabinets, and doors can all be removed from a building and it will remain standing. If you remove all of the wood from a stick-built house there is virtually nothing left.

I don't know anything about this so I am curious: that doesn't sound like a lot of wood work so why are the AI companies recruiting so many carpenters?

The forms needed to pour concrete is my guess.

Steel stud framing is done by carpenters, any interior partition wall framing is done by carpenters. Also any soffits, front for gypsum ceiling clouds in offices, etc will be framed by carpenters. Maybe Meta has them install doors as well?

>There is zero wood in a data center.

Pretty broad generalisation.

Theres no wood on the data floor of a Tier 4 datacenter.

I am not convinced that every DC being built as a result of AI demand is going to be a brilliant T4 datacenter. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if theres a lot of shit going on in the US, which from my admittedly limited experience has some really shithouse datacenters as it is.

Theres a small DC operator near me, 10-20 racks, bit of a joke really other than their position makes them high demand by telcos. Last time I was there <10 years ago had MDF floors above their cable paths. Might have been a wooden partition too.

But to be a pain in the ass, my local T4 DC has a significant amount of timber in the foyer and break rooms. The meeting rooms too. My guess is, theres tons in the office area.

Theres also a ton of temporary construction hacks going on there are they expand. They had some temporary walls built across the common room for instance.

I wouldnt be surprised if carpenters were useful for things like, drop ceilings, liftable floor tiles, general dogsbody stuff.

> Pretty broad generalization

Pretty bad quoting of my post

I could have quoted the whole thing wouldn't change what I said.

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