Google is expanding its data center footprint in Oklahoma with a new facility in Stillwater and an expansion in Pryor, while Meta is locking in a nationwide union pipeline to build out even more of the same infrastructure — all of it designed to harvest, process, and store your data at unprecedented scale.
The Tulsa World reported Google's Oklahoma expansion as straightforward economic news. Fox Business framed Meta's partnership with North America's Building Trades Unions as a jobs story. Neither outlet bothered to ask the obvious question: what exactly runs through these facilities?
The answer is your digital life. Every search, every message, every location ping, every voice command — all of it flows through data centers like the ones Google is building in Oklahoma and Meta is constructing across the country. These aren't factories that make things. They are the physical backbone of the surveillance economy, and they are expanding fast.
Meta announced a partnership with NABTU, giving the company access to a network of 1,900 apprenticeship and training facilities and more than 3.2 million skilled craft professionals in the U.S. and Canada. NABTU President Sean McGarvey told Fox Business the group currently has roughly 300,000 people in its registered apprenticeship system and could ramp that up to a million based on demand. That is not a small number. That is an army of labor being mobilized to build the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
Meta President Dina Powell McCormick framed it in familiar terms: these workers are "building the American infrastructure needed to ensure America's values lead the AI race globally." Notice the phrasing. Not American workers. Not American interests. American values — as defined by the same company that has spent years throttling speech, deplatforming dissidents, and feeding user data to intelligence agencies.
McGarvey noted the demand spans HVAC technicians, laborers, operating engineers, and more. He also made clear the work does not end when construction finishes. "The need for skilled craft on a constant basis in these digital facilities is ongoing long after initial construction is complete," he said. These centers require permanent maintenance — permanent staffing — permanent power consumption. They are not temporary job creators. They are permanent installations in the surveillance landscape.
NABTU's unions and contractor partners invest more than $3 billion annually in training and education, according to Meta's announcement. Meta said the partnership builds on its "Future Is For Everyone Fund," aimed at investing in communities, including teachers, first responders, and energy and water infrastructure. The irony of a company that drains local water and energy resources to cool its server farms branding itself as a community investor would be funny if it were not so deliberate.
Fox Business ran the story under the headline about skilled trades and the AI boom. Tulsa World kept it local. Neither mentioned surveillance, data privacy, or the constitutional questions these facilities raise. That is the pattern: Big Tech builds the infrastructure of control, and the press covers it as a jobs press release.
The question is not whether these data centers create construction jobs. They do. The question is what those jobs are building — and who controls what runs through the wires once the last worker goes home.
