The AI gold rush has a dress code: steel-toe boots

NEW YORK, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Not every winner in the AI race makes chips. Some sell cowboy boots.

Boot Barn, a U.S. retailer best known for western wear, said on Tuesday that a growing share of its bulk workwear orders were now tied to data-center construction.

The brand has long sold boots in bulk to oil and gas and construction firms looking to outfit their entire teams. Now, "more and more often, those are data centers," CEO John Hazen said at the Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference in New York.

The company now finds itself tracking the progress of nearby data center projects to determine what kinds of boots to stock in local stores, underscoring how the AI spending surge is rippling far beyond Silicon Valley and reshaping fortunes across the broader economy.

Boot Barn, which sells western-style and work boots across its nearly 600 stores, has seen comparable sales growth in its work boots business for the past five consecutive quarters. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on revenue growth figures tied to data centers.

Employment in the U.S. construction sector has ticked up this year, driven by demand for labor to build data centers. Construction added 22,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported.

The growing appetite for workwear shows the sheer scale of the data-center buildout underway in the U.S., even as some AI executives have recently urged caution about the pace of the technology's development and communities increasingly push back against the energy and water demands of new facilities.

"When they're clearing dirt, we need regular work boots. When they're building the four walls, we are looking at steel-toe work boots," Hazen said.

Workwear maker Brunt Workwear is seeing a similar pattern. The company told Reuters that some of its strongest demand is coming from California and Texas, two states attracting some of the largest AI infrastructure investments.