James Waddy wanted to be a professional athlete. He got the mileage. The 33-year-old lead engineer logs about 30,000 steps a day inside a million-square-foot Digital Realty Trust (DLR) data center in Ashburn, Va., sniffing for burning equipment, feeling cooling tubes for cracks and checking for dead lights and broken transformers. He oversees dozens of engineers who do the same and calls himself The General. Pacing a raised floor above the chamber that cools the servers, he gave the Journal the day’s report: “I don’t smell anything. Everything’s running right.”
The building is nine years old and sits in Data Center Alley, about an hour outside Washington. It employs about 50 people, with up to 120 on site counting contract security and customers’ staff, and its hallways run long enough that some technicians ride scooters. Now multiply: Data Center Map counts roughly 2,700 operating U.S. data centers, nearly 400 under construction and at least 1,500 in planning. Job seekers have noticed. More than a million people searched Indeed for data-center roles this year; August searches ran eight times the early-2022 level.
What the build-out pays
The pay is why. Indeed finds hourly maintenance and installation work at data centers pays about 42% more than similar jobs elsewhere; a project manager makes around $115,000. Digital Realty says its entry-level engineers make roughly $66,000 and average pay can top $120,000 with experience. Equinix (EQIX), the other giant landlord of the internet, says the scarce skills are electrical systems, network engineering and cooling — trades, not code — and Northern Virginia Community College has launched a data-center program with industry help.
The complication is next door. In Atlanta, Digital Realty wants an exemption from a local ban on data centers near transit so it can build a $500 million center, and locals have pushed back. A March Gallup poll found nearly half of Americans strongly oppose local AI data centers. Don Atkinson, 53, who has spent about 14 years at the company and now manages, told the Journal the sudden turn in public opinion toward the place where he built a solid career feels weird. He doesn’t use much AI himself.
Our read
The paycheck is the useful part. The AI build-out gets covered as a coders’ boom, but the demand is for electrical, cooling and network skills, and the pay is the kind of number that moves a household’s cash flow (M5): about 42% more than similar hourly maintenance and installation jobs elsewhere, per Indeed, and about $66,000 for an entry-level engineer at Digital Realty. For a career changer, the door can open at a community college; it doesn’t always take a four-year degree. For a family staring at a 529, the account can generally pay for a qualifying program as readily as a dorm.
For investors, the build-out shows up in the landlords. Digital Realty and Equinix are real-estate investment trusts, and the risk this story adds isn’t demand — it’s permission. A transit-corridor ban in Atlanta, a poll with nearly half the country strongly opposed and a midterm season in which data centers are a live issue add up to permitting risk, which no growth story can vote away. Investments (IN04): a boom’s hunger for workers says today’s demand is real; it doesn’t say the stock is cheap. Hold what fits the plan, and don’t add because the hallways are long enough for scooters.