Rosendin Electric

Rosendin Electric is an employee-owned electrical contractor founded in San Jose in 1919, now one of the largest electrical builders in the United States. The firm wires the projects that define the current construction cycle: data centers, semiconductor fabs, hospitals, transit and renewable energy plants. As hyperscale campuses order more electrical capacity than mid-sized utilities once used, contractors at Rosendin’s scale — with heavy prefabrication and design-build capability — are the ones who can actually deliver a gigawatt of power infrastructure on schedule. That positions the firm squarely in the data center and advanced-manufacturing boom pulling nonresidential construction to record levels.

Rosendin’s own company history traces back to Moses and Bertha Rosendin, who started Rosendin Electric Motor Works at their home at 78 Race Street in San Jose, rewinding irrigation pump motors for farms across what the company’s history page calls the Valley of Heart’s Delight. That page notes Moses, an immigrant from Mexico, expanded into shipyard contracts during World War II as Bay Area industrial demand surged.

Employee ownership began incrementally: Rosendin’s history page states that employees started purchasing the company from the Rosendin family in 1992, and it became fully employee-owned in the 2000s under then-CEO Tom Sorley. Revenue crossed $100 million for the first time in the 1990s, $1 billion in the 2010s and $5 billion in the 2020s under current CEO Keith Douglas.

The company’s service lineup, as listed on its site, breaks into four groups: building information modeling, engineering, instrumentation and controls, and service and maintenance. Rosendin also operates Modular Power Solutions, a sister company established in Sherman, Texas that builds prefabricated electrical rooms shipped on skids to data center customers, with additional facilities in McKinney and Lewisville, Texas, and Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.

For emergency work, Rosendin publishes a region-by-region dispatch list rather than a single national line: separate numbers cover the San Jose Bay Area, the greater San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, the Phoenix metro area, Maryland, Las Vegas, Oregon and Washington, Central Texas and Virginia, plus a dedicated low-voltage response line for Silicon Valley and Southern California.

Rosendin’s history page also lists specific project credits: renovation of the Harvey Milk Terminal at San Francisco International Airport, SoFi Stadium in Southern California, the Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena), the Aria Campus in Las Vegas, an expansion of the Moscone Center, the California Academy of Sciences, and repair work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge deck following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Earlier in its history, the company also worked on the Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Shuttle launch facility in Santa Barbara County.