As far as any investor in the US data sector is concerned, there’s money in them thar hills. Long seen as the furtive support act to Big Tech, the data center industry is now widely regarded as the physical lynchpin of the AI revolution. More AI-based services require more servers, which means more campuses to house them – with investors ready to spend up to trillions of dollars to make that happen and the promise of plentiful returns after they're built.

That is, if they ever get built in the first place. More than just cash is required to build a data center, they also need people, beginning with construction crews equipped with diggers, wrecking balls, steel, and concrete and, finally, engineers, security guards, and back-office staff to man the facility for the couple of decades it remains in operation. All of these are in desperately short supply, leading to backlogs on some data center build-outs of eight and half months, according to trade association US Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC).

“Skilled trades workers, particularly electricians, are a huge constraint at the moment,” says Anirban Basu, chief economist at ABC. “While weak demand for other commercial segments has improved the supply of available workers, contractors are still struggling to remain adequately staffed.”

An ageing workforce

The US construction industry stands to benefit enormously from the boom in data center demand. Deloitte has predicted that total sectoral spending this year will be dragged upward by 1.8 percent, the consequence of building costs for mid-sized sites spiking to between $500 million and $2 billion. Total investment into buildouts alone between 2025 and 2030, meanwhile, is expected to hit $380 billion. Some of the largest construction firms in the country are making careful preparations, said Deloitte, “reassessing their project portfolios to align with these new priorities [and] investing in capabilities to compete for mega-projects such as data centers and advanced energy facilities.”

But to cash in, the industry will have to overcome a lack of available staff. A big reason for the shortage in available workers, says Basu, is that the US construction workforce is getting older. While it might have succeeded in recruiting more entry-level staff in recent years, the sector “still remains old relative to both historical averages and other industries,” with more than one in five construction workers over the age of 55 as of 2024, and many now choosing to retire.

Plugging the resulting gap in contractor numbers will be no easy fea. For its part, ABC estimates that the US construction industry will need to hire up to 349,000 additional workers in 2026 alone. With the Trump administration cracking down hard on legal and illegal migration into the US (current estimates hold that up to 30 percent of construction workers are foreign-born, with many undocumented), the industry will have to recruit and train these workers almost exclusively in-country. In the meantime, the acute shortage of workers in specialized professionals is causing delays to data center construction that are almost unique to that sector (delays in other construction categories, says Basu, are “unlikely.”)

That’s complicated, in turn, by pervasive supply chain constraints. Lead times for equipment delivery can range from eight to 24 months, while operators are waiting up to 210 weeks for transformers. Developers are also paying through the nose for copper, timber, steel and aluminium – a premium that looks likely to rise even higher if the Trump administration’s new tariff regime for these materials beds in. It doesn’t help that much of the equipment required to build out a data center, too, has to be customized. “If it’s engineered to order,” says Kelly Marchese, an infrastructure leader at Deloitte, “that just adds to the long cycle time.”

Marchese is well-versed in the careworn anxieties of US data center operators. Out of their top seven concerns, according to a survey by Deloitte in April 2025, is the rigmarole of getting new facilities hooked up to the grid. Workforce constraints rank sixth, but Marchese believes that staffing and equipment shortages are much more important than their perception among operators suggests (“I was glad,” she says, “to get your call!”). Some workarounds are within easy reach, she says: diversifying suppliers, for example, and trying not to order customised parts and machinery wherever possible. A more intractable problem, though, lies in hiring the men and women – especially engineers – who’ll work in the facility long after it’s been built. Simply put, says Marchese, “there's not enough of them to go around.”

A coming skills crisis

Like in construction, a wave of retirements is exacerbating this shortage, says the Uptime Institute’s director of education, Matthew Hawkins. “For the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve been talking to the industry, going to events, and telling people, ‘There is a skills crisis coming’,” says Hawkins, a little wearily. “We’re not bringing enough new people into the industry to get the knowledge and skills to replace those people, and the knowledge and skills required are changing.”

One area where this is creating problems is liquid cooling. “If you’re bringing water into the white space that typically isn’t sitting there in the first place,” says Hawkins, “that’s a whole new skillset that people have got to understand that’s going to ring more risk and more issues around the reliability of staff and their competencies.”

So are the basic demands of the job. Demand for data centers is such that many are now being built beyond established ecosystems like Ashburn, Virginia and Hillsboro, Oregon, with sites in the Midwest becoming increasingly attractive to operators. The prospect of moving their families to locations they regard as the middle of nowhere may be putting potential applicants, too, and complicating the long-term operation of these facilities. “You’re moving away from where you may have a workforce,” says Hawkins, “to areas where [it] may not have even existed before.”

How, then, can US operators recruit more engineers? One way is to raise salaries, with entry-level positions now commanding annual salaries of $60,000-$80,000, well above the national average for a junior role. Another is to diversify the talent pool. “We are finding experts who understand power and cooling from sectors like nuclear energy, the military and aerospace,” Laura Laltrello, chief operating officer for data center developer Applied Digital, told IEEE Spectrum in January. “Expertise doesn’t have to come from a data center background.”

These hiring strategies only end up nibbling around the edges of the problem, though, argues Hawkins. “Wage inflation and talent poaching? It’s been going on for years,” he says, arguing that the strategy is not sustainable over the long-term. Recruiting veterans, too, is a great way of sourcing new talent, but also one that other sectors have cottoned on to for decades. “Companies can’t just say, ‘We’re going to pay another $5,000, $10,000, the salaries are going to keep increasing,’ because you’re just poaching from the same talent pool – and that pool’s not big enough.”

What about hiring from abroad? While common among data center operators in East Asia, Hawkins explains, it’s not easy to do in the US, where the Trump administration continues to narrow opportunities to recruit foreign personnel. A more realistic way to solve the problem would be to increase the number of pathways into the sector. An industry-wide effort to build more technical colleges would help, says Hawkins, citing the positive impact on talent inflows in the UK from the introduction of the Digital Futures Programme at UTC Heathrow.

Such courses are emerging: see, for example, Microsoft’s partnership with Gateway Technical College in Wisconsin to create a new ‘Datacenter Academy’ to train 1,000 students in sector-specific roles over the next five years, or Illinois’ College of DuPage’s creation of new training pathways for HVAC, IT and heating engineers in the sector. The latter’s president, Dr. Muddassir Siddiqi, has been an especially outspoken proponent of new investment in community colleges to increase the volume of technicians applying for data center roles. Such institutions “educate more than one-third of the nation’s undergraduates,” Siddiqi wrote in Community College Daily, “and serve as primary access points for technical training.”

A branding problem?

That progress might be accelerated further, says Marchese, if the industry makes a concerted attempt to tackle its branding problem. That’s not a reference to the time operators have to spend trying to convince local communities that they are not the water-guzzling, power-hungry behemoths that the media has made them out to be (though, concedes the Deloitte analyst, that is a growing problem). Rather, it’s making young people aware that working in a data center is even an option. “These trade jobs need a good marketing program,” says Marchese. “These are amazing jobs that you should want your high school graduate to go into.”

But while most engineering students will know, from secondary school onwards, that they can apply their skills to building everything from bicycles to bridges, explains Hawkins, most won’t make the same connection with data centers until much later in their academic life. “If you’re not telling children at a much younger age that this industry exists, and the fact that it powers everything that they touch and do, you’ve got no hope of ever really driving them into our industry,” he says. Historically, data centers have never done “a very good job of telling the world, or the next generation of the workforce, how great this industry is and what we can do.”

As soon as you start that discussion with young people about the role of data centers in supporting almost all of the digital services in the economy, Hawkins argues, a wider conversation might be had about what types of roles are available within the sector. It’s not just engineers who operate these facilities, after all. “Everyone forgets that, for all these things to run, you have back room [staff], you have sales, you have marketing,” he says. Data center operators also need to get much better at defining pathways into their industry. Imagine, say, a conversation about becoming a data center technician. “Is that an IT data technician, and M&E data center technician? Is it a structured, cabling-specific job? How does that role meet the needs of the business and the industry?”

It won’t be easy for the industry to have these discussions amid the rising din of protests against its expanding physical presence – but it’s vital that it starts, says Hawkins, if it doesn’t want to fail in meeting the ever-increasing demand for digital services. “I go to events around the world, and there’s always someone on stage talking about a piece of hardware or software and how we make sure that that piece of hardware carries on working, or we’ve got a risk to our operation,” he says. The same now applies to the sector’s human capital, and the risks incumbent upon operators if they fail to recruit enough staff or train them properly. The US data center industry needs more people, to be sure – and people who know what they’re doing.