[Ep. 078]

The Real AI Bottleneck Is Electricians, Not Chips: Ian Hoppe (Condoit)

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Ian Hoppe grew up in the trade. A family of electricians, summers in the field from age 14, then a degree in electrical engineering. He now runs Condoit, a data platform for the electrical industry. It catalogs the equipment inside a building and the wiring that connects it, structured the way an electrical system actually works. Every panel gets an asset tag and a QR code. Scan it and you see what feeds it, what it feeds, and its maintenance history.

The problem Condoit goes after is hidden by design. Roughly 5.9 million buildings in the US have no electrical documentation. The knowledge lives in one veteran's head, and that generation is retiring by the tens of thousands. At the same time, AI data centers are set to triple capacity by 2030, and both Google and Microsoft have warned that a shortage of electricians could hamstring AI in the US.

So the bottleneck on Physical AI, energy, and every hard industry that runs on power is not chips or inference. It is the people who install and maintain the grid behind the wall. And the fact that almost nobody knows how that grid is put together.

The conversation

Jay: I found there are 5.9 million buildings in the US alone that are undocumented, at a time when so much AI is running through hidden data centers. When so much of this is hidden by design, how do you help people understand the scale of the electrification challenge?

Ian: For every facility out there, inside each one there are hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of electrical equipment and millions of wires connecting them. It is the history of construction in the United States. We've been building buildings since the beginning of the country, and that is what we're trying to capture. You could call it the lifeblood of the economy. Electricity flowing through all of these pieces of equipment behind walls and inside electrical rooms right around the corner from where you sit right now.

Jay: We're in this building, the lights are on. What's the problem ahead?

Ian: It's like a lot of other industries before they got digitized. The financial industry was documented, but it was on paper and spreadsheets. Then Excel came out, and then you got the whole fintech revolution. My CTO ran Venmo. Right now the electrical industry runs on PDFs, hand-drawn drawings on legal pads, and paper panel schedules inside the equipment. It's the same now as it was in the 1960s.

Jay: If a hospital or a data center is running undocumented systems, what's the big deal? Fires, outages, loss of life?

Ian: One of our customers has a data center in the southeast. A few weeks ago, before they put Condoit in, a chiller on the roof went out. A chiller cools the air, incredibly important in a data center. First question, what feeds it? I don't know. It's going to take 30 to 45 minutes to figure that out. It costs around half a million dollars an hour when a data center is down. Now take a hospital. You've got someone on the operating table, and there's a piece of equipment nobody is quite sure how to turn on and off. It takes 20, 30 minutes to chase it down. That is an immense problem, and it's in every building you walk into. The problem gets magnified in high-stakes systems: data centers, water treatment plants, hospitals.

Jay: Who's most incentivized for this documentation to get done?

Ian: We call these the stakeholders of an electrical system. Electricians, who work for electrical contractors. The facilities maintenance managers. The owner. The insurance provider, who bears the risk of everything inside, including fires. And the regulators. OSHA, your local and state building commissions.

Jay: AI data centers are projected to triple capacity by 2030. Google and Microsoft have both said that if we don't get enough electricians, it's going to hamstring AI. What's the biggest choke point?

Ian: There is more work to be done than ever before, and fewer people to do it, at an increasing pace. Trade schools are ramping back up. And the rates for electricians are going through the roof. The number one union here in New York is going for something like $110 an hour right now for a journeyman [verify]. The base rate is well into six figures. With overtime you're looking at a quarter million dollars a year. And we're losing people. The journeyman who taught me is retiring in a few years. His whole generation is leaving by the tens of thousands, and you can't just flip somebody on as an electrician. It takes four or five years.

Jay: Is AGI dependent on there being enough electricians? Is the bottleneck people or parts?

Ian: It's both. But you don't know how many parts you need until you get more people and proper documentation out there. An understanding of how stuff is put together is the number one bottleneck. Not just to data center maintenance and construction, but to electrification broadly. Every EV charger, every commercial solar array. If you wanted to put solar on this 150-year-old building, it would take somebody a couple of days just to figure out how it's all put together. Same for a 15-year-old data center down the street. If you're going to add new loads, you have to understand how it's put together, and nobody does.

Jay: Why did the labor shortage happen?

Ian: I was an outlier. It's the family trade. My dad put me in the field at 14. But 98% of my class, I graduated in '06, everybody went to college. That was the expectation, plus federal student loan programs that made it easy. What we're seeing now is a huge burden of student debt and jobs that don't pay enough to cover it. There's a successful push now to get more kids into trade school. The Dallas IBEW non-union branch roughly quadrupled its apprenticeship program in three years. But those kids still have four years until they turn out. You have to work 8,000 hours. So we're going to bottom out first.

Jay: Give me the catastrophic scenario.

Ian: If we don't catch up on electricians, supply chain, or technology, we will not be able to keep up with the rest of the world. You can have all the chips you want, but if you can't power them, it doesn't matter.

Jay: What does Condoit actually do in the field?

Ian: Condoit is a data platform for the electrical industry. We catalog electrical equipment and all the raceways that connect it. It's built like a database, but in the structure of an electrical system. Everything leads back up to a utility connection or a generator or a solar array. One brand new customer runs a UPS distribution center in Salt Lake City. That's 3,500 pieces of electrical equipment, the largest one west of the Mississippi. Each piece gets its own asset tag, a Condoit tag, and anybody can scan the QR code and it takes them to that piece of equipment inside the Condoit ecosystem.

Jay: A Carfax report for that panel.

Ian: Exactly. It's like that map at the mall that says you are here. Upstream is this major switchboard. Downstream it's feeding this chiller, this EV charger, this bank of receptacles. Here's the last preventive maintenance inspection. Here's the last infrared image. Once a facility is captured, you get a complete, transparent view of the system, not just on site but from the office. Otherwise it's one or two truck rolls and a bunch of scribbles on a legal pad.

Jay: Boots on the ground. What changes about my workflow with Condoit instead of a clipboard?

Ian: Before, I'd walk into the maintenance director's office and say, where are your as-builts? And he'd say, I've got some old drawings under Bob's desk, and the rest lives in Bob's head. And Bob retired. So I'd start where the power company hits the building and follow the raceways downstream, take the cover off, get the wire sizes, take pictures, follow the next one. One hospital, St. Vincent's in Birmingham, had 896 pieces of equipment. It took me and an apprentice two and a half weeks. I drew it by hand in red pen, redrew it in AutoCAD, ran it through an old program called SKM Power Tools, printed it, put it in a binder, and handed it to the maintenance director. Who put it under his desk and never thought about it again. With Condoit, they send us any old documents first. We ingest them. So when they walk in, 70% of it is already there. Their job is to verify it. The asset tags prove the equipment actually exists, because somebody laid hands on it.

Jay: What the industry calls a digital twin.

Ian: We're not a digital twin in the industry sense. What we are is a source of truth for the boots on the ground, so they can make decisions and analyze the systems in front of them.

Jay: How is Condoit unlocking jobs and dollars for electricians?

Ian: We just announced a partnership with FLIR, owned by Teledyne. They make infrared cameras. Infrared imaging is required by many insurers, and now under NFPA 70B, the preventive-maintenance addendum to the National Electric Code. An infrared image shows hot spots, which mean something's overloaded or not connected correctly. That used to all be on paper. Condoit's integration pulls the infrared information straight from the FLIR cameras and cuts the time to do an infrared audit in a major facility by half. A medium facility could take two or three weeks, half of that just building the report in Microsoft Word. Have you ever tried to format a photo in Word? Now do it 1,600 times. And these are electricians making $100 an hour fighting with Word formatting. Now the report is seconds. Every infrared project you can get to twice as fast is a new bump of revenue.

Ian: There's something new we've kept under wraps, called Condoit Pull Box. I'm building relationships with large facility maintenance organizations that have portfolios in the thousands. They don't have their electrical records. We ingest their old PDFs and plug them into the Condoit contractor network. If you're a Condoit customer, you get access to a new bank of work. That warehouse that hasn't called you back in 15 years is suddenly on Condoit and needs a data collection. We're building a network, not just a tool.

Jay: Give me a hot take. What's a waste of time in the industry?

Ian: The biggest waste of time is BIM, building information modeling. A three-dimensional model of a facility. Billions of venture dollars have gone into it. In architecture it makes some sense. But look at that half-inch raceway. Are you going to model that with a three-inch offset? You won't get it exactly right. And if it's off a little, that box is in the wrong place, and the lights it feeds are off. We have to accelerate the work done by the people out there installing and maintaining real equipment. They don't need to know the exact position of that box. They need to know how many wires are inside it.

Jay: Everybody claims to own the customer data. Why is your data set the Bloomberg terminal of the grid?

Ian: The engineer of record owns the digital assets. The only way for the hospital to get a record is to request a PDF. What we're trying to do, and it shakes the industry a little, is say everybody needs access to the shared data set. One customer asked, what if my competitor wants the data? Well, if they're in the building, they can collect it themselves on paper. The most important thing is that everybody has access, because locking it down only serves one party. All boats rise when the data is in place and everyone can do their job faster, safer, and more reliably.

Jay: What does success look like?

Ian: We want to be the Bloomberg terminal, the Google Maps of all electrical system information. Think about what Google Maps did for our efficiency as a species. That's the level of granularity we're collecting, secondary side of the meter, and it does not exist today. Some of our customers' guys in the service vans spend up to half their time just chasing stuff down. It's a huge time suck, the way we've done business for three generations, and it has to stop.

Jay: Ian, this was a lot of fun. Grateful to have you on CLIMB.

Ian: Likewise, Jay. Thanks for having me.

Pull quotes

"You can have all the chips you want, but if you can't power them, it doesn't matter."
"An understanding of how stuff is put together is the number one bottleneck. Not just to data center maintenance and construction, but to electrification broadly."
"It costs around half a million dollars an hour when a data center is down."
"Every one of those lights is like a star in the sky. An electrician had their hands on every one of them. And that's just the fixture at the end of the wire."
"All boats rise when the data is in place and everyone can do their job faster, safer, and more reliably."