Data centers are rapidly expanding across the U.S. as tech companies race to build out the infrastructure needed to power the AI boom. But who is actually working inside of these buildings, and what are they doing? WSJ’s Owen Tucker-Smith joins us to discuss the unique—but vital—jobs that keep our internet operational. Isabelle Bousquette, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute, hosts.
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[00:00:03] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, September 25th. I'm Isabel Busquets, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. Data centers have stirred up a heated debate over the last few years. The facilities, which contain rows and rows of servers needed for powering both the nation's internet and its massive AI boom, have been criticized for their consumption of power and water and their overall impact on the environment and local communities.
[00:00:31] And as the country's data center footprint has rapidly expanded, so has the backlash. You're the biggest liar I have ever seen! The rage against data centers on full display in Battleground, Michigan. For 13 hours, hundreds of residents protesting two proposed data centers, worried they will spike utility bills, drain water resources, and destroy farmland.
[00:00:55] One way that tech giants and data center operators have been trying to smooth things over is by pointing to local job creation. Nearly 400 more facilities are already under construction, with an additional 1,500 planned, according to data provider Data Center Map. But what is it like to work in one?
[00:01:17] WSJ's Owen Tucker-Smith traveled to Ashburn, Virginia, one of the country's largest data center clusters, to see firsthand what the day-to-day of a data center employee looks like, why the jobs fetch surprisingly high salaries, and how the growing backlash against AI is impacting the workers. He joins us now to share what he learned. Owen, these data centers, these are buildings that look pretty nondescript from the outside.
[00:01:46] We think of them as just being full of servers, but obviously, people actually work inside these buildings. What do they do? These are not the kinds of staffs that you'd see in maybe an auto manufacturing plant where there's, you know, a thousand people. It's more like 50 or 100. But there's a crew of engineers and technicians who their job is basically to make sure that nothing breaks. Because the one job of a data center is to stay operational.
[00:02:15] The goal is 99.999% of the time, because if you go down for a few seconds, then America's internet is in peril. You went inside a data center to talk to workers for this story. Let's hear a little bit from one of them, talking through what he's checking to make sure things are running smoothly. And as a heads up for listeners, this is a little hard to hear because of how loud the machinery is. From here, I see there's no visible leaks, right? I would also check to see if there's any smells or anything like that. No? Looks good?
[00:02:45] So they are trying to make sure that the servers are still running and that they're not overheating and that there are no cracks in the equipment and that the electricity is all set. And so it's a lot of maintenance and repairs, communicating with customers, and just making sure that everything looks good. When tech companies decide to build a data center somewhere, I understand one of the things they'll try to do to sell it to the local community is to say, this is something that will bring a lot of jobs here.
[00:03:15] Does that prove out? Yeah, so it's sort of one of those compared to what questions, because a lot of times when people see a big facility being built, they think of kind of the classic American manufacturing facility, which it can anchor some of these cities, whether it's like the defense industry or cars or something else. These are huge plants that employ hundreds if not thousands of people who then form the core of the town. And this isn't really that.
[00:03:44] The data centers will say that compared to many office buildings, these facilities employ a lot of people and that we shouldn't be complaining about an extra 50 or 100 or 200 jobs in a town. That's still a net positive. But I think some of the employment-related backlash comes from the fact that people expect a facility that might be 1 million, 2 million square feet large to employ more than a few hundred people.
[00:04:12] And so when you walk around one of these facilities, it can be a little bit eerie because a lot of the rooms are empty and there's these big cavernous hallways that just stretch forever that you can't see the end of and you can't really see people. So there is a little kind of dystopian element of it, but they obviously do require humans, at least for now, to keep them running. One thing I'm curious about is how desirable these jobs actually are. I thought it was really interesting.
[00:04:41] One of the things you reported was that employees sometimes zip around on scooters, which sounds fun, but they also sometimes have to sleep there overnight. What's the day-to-day like? The sleeping there overnight is a worst-case scenario. It's often a lot of the people who are in a data center at any given moment are customer employees. So a lot of these data centers are run by one of these companies, in this case, Digital Realty, that makes and operates data centers
[00:05:06] and then leases out space to the Apples and the Oracles of the world. And they have these customers who are going to want to send in their own technicians. And so if those technicians get stuck in bad weather, there are cots, there are showers, there's food for them to stay. But yeah, I mean, it's a very unique job. As you mentioned, they're huge. So it's a very physical job just to get around. One of the employees I talked to said that he logs around 30,000 steps a day,
[00:05:35] just getting from one end to the other to do his rounds, to check on everything. Compared to other sort of similar jobs at other companies, the pay is thought to be higher. Indeed has done some analysis, at least for the maintenance hourly workers, that found that their wages were more than 40% higher than similar hourly maintenance jobs at other facilities. You know, at one of these companies, you might make, when you're first starting out as an engineer, looking after the equipment and doing maintenance,
[00:06:05] you might make around 66,000 at Digital Realty. But the more experienced roles will get up to around 120,000. So there's room for growth. But as I mentioned, a lot of these people are getting sort of significant raises from the similar jobs that they would have had at a non-data center company. There's a lot of interest in the jobs. Despite all the public backlash across the country to these facilities,
[00:06:33] Indeed has tracked like an eightfold increase over the last few years of interest in the jobs. So there does seem to be hunger to work in these places. But I think there's still a lot of people who just have no idea what goes on inside of them. Would you want to work in a data center? If you're a listener on Spotify, leave us a comment with your thoughts. Coming up, we're diving into what it takes to get hired at a data center
[00:07:00] and how workers actually feel about the growing backlash against the industry. That's after the break. So, Owen, we've talked about how interest in these data center jobs has increased a lot in recent years. But what kind of skill set does it take to actually get hired? The bar has lowered over time.
[00:07:26] It used to be they wanted high expertise electricians, people who had worked in HVAC or sort of a similar field at a different kind of facility or a data center, that you would be kind of a specialized data center employee, which would involve knowing how to deal with the cables and this high-tech machinery or having supply chain expertise to source the materials. But we have a shortage of electricians in the U.S. now, a shortage of a lot of these kind of blue-collar trades.
[00:07:56] And so the companies are looking kind of to younger and younger people to fill these roles. In Ashburn, Virginia, which is really the hub of data centers in America, they have partnered with the local community college, which has actually set up a degree program for data center work. So the idea is you can go to people who are 18 and 19 years old and maybe don't know what they want to do for their careers and say, this is a booming industry and there's going to be a lot of jobs and we can teach you how to do it.
[00:08:26] But so more and more often they're finding people who don't have a lot of these skills and trying to teach them, which they're going to have to do. Because even if these facilities do only employ 100 people, when you think about how many of them there are in the pipeline, that's still going to be a lot of very specific skilled jobs that they're going to have to fill over the next decade. I want to talk about the backlash to data centers that we mentioned in the beginning. I'm curious, for the data center workers that you talked to, how do they feel like that backlash is impacting them?
[00:08:55] I think it's a really weird time to work at a data center, especially for the people who've worked there for a couple of decades, because data centers aren't new. These facilities have been operating for many, many years to just power broadband and internet and everything and keep the ATM working and run the very mundane tasks of our lives. So these people, when I would ask them about the politics of it all, they never used to get these questions. They would tell their friends and family that they worked at a data center
[00:09:24] and people would just like blink. They wouldn't care. They wouldn't really know what that meant. You know, and now you tell your friends or family that you work at a data center and it's a conversation. So I think it's very strange to see your job not necessarily change, but the reaction change a lot. And I think some people feel a little bit offended by it all. They feel like they're running America's internet and now all of a sudden people have such strong emotions about it.
[00:09:52] But it's also created a lot of opportunity for these workers, the AI boom. Despite the fact that AI has brought a lot of scrutiny to the data centers, it's also like increased the fortunes of these companies because it's given them a lot of work to do. So I think it's an authority topic for them. But for the companies themselves, it's obviously created a whole new job for them. The PR teams at companies like Digital Realty used to not have as much work to do. And now they're going to these cities and having to meet with the mayors
[00:10:22] and city council members when they get there. So it's definitely a job that has changed dramatically over the last few years. That was The Journal's Owen Tucker-Smith. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm Isabel Busquette, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson.
[00:10:51] Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Chris Sinsley is the deputy editor. Litao Malad is our director of shows. And Samantha Hennig is the Wall Street Journal's head of multimedia. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.