We write about gigawatts, billions and zoning fights all the time. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal went and looked at what actually happens inside one — in Ashburn, Virginia, an hour outside Washington, in the stretch people call Data Center Alley.
30,000 steps
James Waddy is 33 and once wanted to play professional sports. Now he walks 30,000 steps a day through a million square feet of Digital Realty facility. He sniffs the equipment for anything burning. He runs his hands along tubes checking for cracks. He looks for dead lights and broken power transformers. As lead engineer he oversees dozens of colleagues doing the same, and calls himself «The General».
«I don’t hear any noises», he says, pacing a raised floor above the chamber that circulates cooling air. «I don’t smell anything. Everything’s running right.»
Some corridors are long enough that technicians ride scooters. There are towering cages packed with wire. And there are cots and showers, for the crew that hunkers down through extreme weather to keep the servers up. Up to 120 people are on site at once; about 50 are employees, the rest contracted security or staff sent by customers. Plenty of rooms still sit empty, because the building is that big.
What the build-out is doing to the labour market
There are roughly 2,700 operational data centres in the US, according to Data Center Map. Nearly 400 more are under construction and at least 1,500 are in planning. Over a million people have searched for data-centre roles on Indeed this year; in August the search volume ran eight times what it was in early 2022.
And it pays. Indeed’s research puts the premium for hourly maintenance and installation workers at roughly 42% over comparable jobs elsewhere. A data-centre project manager lands around $115,000. Digital Realty says entry-level engineers make about $66,000, with experienced staff topping $120,000.
Electrical systems, network engineering and cooling are where the demand sits, says Brandi Galvin Morandi, chief people officer at operator Equinix. Meta is funding training programmes, and Northern Virginia Community College built a data-centre track with industry help. Cindy Fiedelman, Digital Realty’s CHRO, frames the shortage precisely: these facilities need a specific mix of technical training, safety discipline and hands-on experience, and that mix is scarce relative to how fast the industry is growing.
The pushback is already at the door
Digital Realty runs more than 300 data centres across six continents and leases the Ashburn space to Oracle, Meta and IBM. In Atlanta it wants to build a $500 million facility and needs an exemption from a local ban on data centres near transit hubs. Residents object; the project is stuck.
The number that never reaches a balance sheet
Data centres don’t need many people — a few dozen to a few hundred permanent staff per site. Multiply that across nearly 400 sites under construction and 1,500 planned, and you get a figure that matters politically: well-paid industrial work without a degree, in places that don’t have much of it.
That’s one half of the ledger. The other half shows up on the neighbours’ power bills, which the House voted on 417 to 3 last week. Work in Ashburn and you earn from the boom. Live next door and you help pay for it. Local politics turns on exactly that gap — and Atlanta is already showing how it goes.