Data center staffing in Central and West Texas. The Stargate corridor.

Yes. Wide Effect provides licensed electricians, skilled trades crews, commissioning specialists, and operations talent for data center projects across Central and West Texas, including the Austin and San Marcos corridor, San Antonio, and the Abilene AI campuses. We support all three phases: construction, commissioning, and live operations, backed by a national database of more than 500,000 skilled trades and mission-critical professionals.

Texas has at least 248 data center projects planned statewide, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The anchor of the Central and West Texas corridor is Stargate in Abilene, a four million square foot complex on just over a thousand acres, part of the $500 billion national AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX, and expected to complete construction in 2026. Oracle has stated that its Abilene campus plus the nearby expansion and three additional sites can deliver more than 5.5 gigawatts of capacity and create more than 25,000 onsite jobs across more than 4,800 acres.

Texas licenses electricians at the individual level through the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. A journeyman electrician license requires 8,000 hours of on-the-job training under a master electrician, with candidates eligible to test at 7,000 hours. A master electrician license requires 12,000 hours plus at least two years as a licensed journeyman. As of February 2026, TDLR recognizes journeyman reciprocity with Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and master reciprocity with Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, and North Carolina. Wide Effect verifies every electrician's Texas license or reciprocal credential before deployment.

Because the projects are enormous and the local labor pools are not. Roughly 1,500 people including site workers, electricians, and engineers have been involved in constructing the Abilene Stargate campus, in a mid-sized West Texas city with no large metro nearby, so crews are imported and housed. Meanwhile data center vacancy is effectively zero in Texas against a record-low 2.3% nationally (JLL), which means schedules carry real revenue. Austin and San Antonio add their own competition from semiconductor and advanced manufacturing employers pulling from the same trades.

Yes. Wide Effect staffs the full lifecycle: licensed electricians, mechanical trades, and site leadership during construction; controls and testing specialists during commissioning; and critical facilities engineers, maintenance technicians, and network infrastructure personnel once the facility is live. One payroll and compliance backbone covers multi-state payroll, prevailing wage coordination, credential validation, and Employer of Record services across every phase.