The explosive growth of AI infrastructure is creating a mad dash for new data center capacity – and more data center staff – unlike anything seen before.
Demand for data center capacity could more than triple by 2030 due to growth in AI and other workloads, according to data from McKinsey.
The biggest companies are building their own data centers – which will also put pressure on the job market. OpenAI, for example, recently announced a $100 billion Stargate project.
Amazon plans to spend over $100 billion on capital expenditures in 2025, president and CEO Andrew Jassy said on a quarterly earnings call in February. “The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS,” he says. That includes data center facilities and hardware, chips, and networking. “We don’t procure it unless we see significant signals of demand… AI represents, for sure, the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the Internet.”
Google plans to invest $75 billion this year, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a keynote at the Google Cloud Next conference in April. “The opportunity with AI is as big as it gets,” he said. “In 2025, we plan to invest around $75 billion in total capex. This investment will be directed towards our servers and data centers, which includes powering our AI compute and cloud business.”
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will spend over $60 billion on capex in 2025. “We’ll bring online approximately 1GW of compute in ’25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs,” he said.
Also in January, Microsoft announced that it plans to spend $80 billion this year on AI-enabled data centers, the majority of it inside the United States.
But smaller enterprises are also rushing into deploying their own AI servers, either via the cloud, service providers, or colocation facilities.
Colocation vacancy in North America declined to a new all-time low of 2.6% at the end of 2024, according to real estate and investment management JLL. That’s despite several years of record construction levels. Any second-generation space that becomes available is re-leased within weeks, the firm reports.
That’s a lot of data centers being built and staffed. This creates challenges for data center managers, who are forced to get creative with recruitment or increase salaries. For employees, the data center gold rush offers opportunities to get in on a new career in a variety of different jobs and skill levels.
The people shortage
Employment in US data centers increased more than 60% between 2016 and 2023, from 306,000 to 501,000 people, according to a January report from the U.S. Census Bureau.
And, according to projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, data center jobs – computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services – are expected to add another 95,400 jobs by 2033, making it one of the 15 fastest-growing industries.
That’s good news for job seekers, but not as good for data center managers, who are already feeling a staffing crunch.
More than half (51%) of data center operators reported difficulty finding qualified candidates to fill job openings in 2024, according to Uptime Institute. The biggest challenge was filling junior and mid-level operations jobs, with 39% of data centers reporting shortfalls. This was followed by electrical jobs, at 33%, operations management at 32% and mechanical at 30%.
Electrical labor climbed to the second highest concern last year since outfitting data center space for high-powered, high-density IT for AI and similar applications requires electrical distribution skills for both IT and cooling.
Ryan Mallory, COO at Charlotte, NC-based colocation provider Flexential, is seeing shortages across all job categories. “It’s a very competitive marketplace right now,” he says.
The shortages aren’t only due to the rapid growth of the industry, Mallory says, but also because the existing workforce is aging and ready for retirement. According to the Uptime Institute’s 2023 survey, there were twice as many employees over the age of 60 (32%) than under the age of 30 (16%) in U.S. data centers.
AI and automation can help, but only to a limited extent. Most operators told Uptime Institute they doubt that AI in the data center will reduce the need for staff within the next five years, while adapting to increasing AI workloads may require additional staff today. Plus, many data center jobs are very hands-on, involving moving equipment around, connecting cables and pipes, and building cages.
Variety of opportunities
Preparing for a job in the new AI-focused data center doesn’t necessarily require advanced degrees. Flexential, for example, is hiring for jobs at all levels of education. “We have strong requirements for construction and trade routes,” says Mallory.
People who’ve built commercial or multi-family buildings, for example, will have skills that can transfer to data centers, he says. There’s also HVAC, plumbing and electrical work, and many other hands-on jobs. “The ideal candidate will have a mechanical background, or a will to learn,” he says.
There are also jobs on the operations side for people with a more programmatic mindset, Mallory adds. “And if they want to get on the engineering side, they can get certifications or be on the path to an electrical engineering degree. An individual who’s focused and ambitious can find a very fulfilling career, both from a personal development and a financial perspective.”
And yes, there are also jobs that require AI and ML knowledge, Mallory says. “It’s a highly competitive market for that skillset as well.”
Forrester analyst Alvin Nguyen says he’s hearing from vendors and clients that data centers are increasingly looking towards AIOps to manage the dense server configurations associated with AI and high-performance computing in general.
On the enterprise side, data center managers also have to manage workloads across data centers, clouds, colocation providers, and managed service providers, he says. Even as automation takes up some of the work, new challenges emerge. For example, data sovereignty laws limit the extent to which workloads can be moved outside of a particular country.
“Being able to set up that kind of infrastructure requires not just AI but also a lot of human understanding,” Nguyen says. “Humans are going to be involved in making sure that the guardrails are there and validating that everything is being followed.”
Another challenging area is liquid cooling, which is seeing high adoption rates since traditional air cooling can’t keep up with the high heat generated by the GPUs used to power AI systems. This is an area where people with HVAC backgrounds can find new opportunities, says Xianming (Simon) Dai, a professor at University of Texas at Dallas.
Installing liquid cooling in data centers isn’t exactly the same as, say, installing an air conditioner, but there’s a lot of overlap. And, because the technology is so new, it’s not like there are a lot of people with specialist experience out there to be hired. Plus, the vendors will provide some training, Dai added.
There’s also a growing need for highly specialized technical talent in the liquid cooling space, says Robbin Caraway, global human resources director at LiquidStack, a liquid cooling company.
“We’re seeing an increased demand for mechanical engineers who can design and build coolant delivery systems, thermal engineers who focus on optimizing heat transfer at the chip level, electrical engineers integrating sensors, controls, and monitoring systems, and reliability engineers working to ensure long-term system uptime and resilience,” she says.
There’s also a need for electro-mechanical and data center technicians who can install, commission, and troubleshoot these systems on-site, she adds. Hyperscale cloud providers, colocation companies, and traditional enterprises pay well for these skills, Caraway says, and are also creating dedicated training programs. Her company is doing the same. “On the local level, we’ve partnered with area colleges to build a pipeline of talent,” she says.
Finally, even though enterprises are expanding their use of on-prem and colo data centers to run their new AI workloads, they also continue to expand their use of the cloud.
“Companies are migrating to the cloud due to cost,” says Tiago Miyaoka, AI and data lead at Andela, a global talent marketplace. “Also, it’s easier to scale in the cloud versus the data center, and it’s easier to manage.” He’s continuing to see high demand for cloud skills, as well as the ability to manage hybrid environments.
“There is demand for professionals with private cloud expertise,” confirms Amr Ahmed, EY Americas infrastructure and service resiliency leader. “Particularly those who can support emerging AI infrastructure builds.”
Even with today’s economic uncertainty, companies investing in AI-driven transformation, cloud infrastructure modernization, and digital resilience are looking for talent, he says.
“The hiring climate remains competitive, with a focus on strategic roles that directly support business-critical initiatives such as AI deployment, automation, cost optimization, and IT/OT operations,” Ahmed says. “While broad-based hiring may be slower, niche skill sets aligned with emerging technologies still present fair opportunities.
How data centers are coping
To deal with the skills shortages, data center managers are widening their talent pipelines – and raising salaries.
“In the past couple of years we’ve been really focused on career paths,” says Flexential’s Mallory. “We work with municipalities and local schools – can we look at some new-to-career entry programs? Are there seniors in high school who aren’t sure they’re going to college? We’re happy to start having conversations if those are individuals we can put into an internship or apprentice program.”
The company is also actively recruiting people exiting the military. “A lot of the operations staff we have are ex-military because of their mindset and the training they’ve received,” Mallory says.
In last year’s Uptime Institute staffing survey, 55% of data center operators said they have initiatives or programs in place to hire people new to the industry, such as recent graduates of colleges, trade schools or training programs.
Data centers are also throwing money at the problem, increasing salaries and bonuses.
According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%.
Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications.
Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations.
“Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.”
These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says.
AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds.
The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary.
The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the industry – only one in 10 operators report staff leaving the industry for non-data-center work in 2024’s survey, down from 17% in 2022.
It’s not all good news, however, because the skills shortage also increases poaching – which drives salaries even higher. According to the survey, 22% of data centers report losing staff to their competitors. The highest reported turnover was in junior and mid-level operations staff, cited by 57% of respondents. The next closest was operations management turnover, at 27%.
The bottom line for job seekers? This is a very good time to look for a job in the data center industry. That’s the advice that Flexential’s Mallory is giving his own kids. “I’ve got kids coming out of college, and I say, ‘Get into the AI data center world. Quickly.’”
Source:: Network World