Welcome to the Magical Mystery Tour of the AI age

National Jobsite Catering serves about 1,500 meals on an average day at each of its dozen data center construction sites.

Jason Andrew for BI At 5 a.m. in Northern Virginia , chefs are already preparing chicken and chile roja enchiladas, fried shrimp tacos, and big batches of rice and beans to feed thousands of data center construction workers.

By late morning, a crew brings the food from the off-site kitchen to a break tent where workers can pick up lunch without leaving the worksite.

They don't pay: The Big Tech companies spending billions on AI infrastructure foot the bill.

On an average day, National Jobsite Catering serves about 1,500 meals at each of its dozen data center construction sites across Northern Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Nevada, and Georgia, founder Scott Kaplan tells me.

The busiest sites serve twice as many.

After one to three years, the crews wrap up and move on.

Kaplan, whose business used to consist of a fleet of food trucks catering one-off events along the East Coast, designed a venture that can follow them.

If you build it, they will cook.

Local restaurants and caterers partner with National Jobsite Catering to scale up and serve an influx of workers.

Jason Andrew for BI National Jobsite Catering is part of the economic ecosystem being generated by America's data center boom.

The tech giants leading the AI buildout are expected to spend more than $5 trillion on technology and data centers through 2030, with more than 1,500 data centers already in the works in the US.

The room where a worker sleeps , the gym he hits before his shift, his parking spot, his lunch — these are all provided by a growing network of businesses.

Local firms in the suburban and rural areas where the bulk of data centers are being built can get a windfall from a single project, but a more lasting proposition is the opportunity to serve site-to-site as construction crews move around.