Data centers are everywhere. What it’s like to work in one. – Part 1 of 2

By Danielle Abril. The Washington Post. September 17, 2024.

These seemingly invisible workers are critical to keeping our connected world humming.

It’s 85 degrees on a sunny July day, but you’d never know deep inside the big black box of a data center housed here. The temperature sits at a cool 70 degrees inside the Equinix facility, which stores servers and hardware that power some of America’s network connections and houses data for critical services.

There are no windows for security purposes. Lit by motion-sensitive overhead fluorescent and blue ambient light, Renan Casaca, one of a handful of technicians on the clock, unravels cables inside a gated area stacked with equipped racks. Machines and fans hum in the background as Casaca, 40, climbs up a ladder to thread a cord through the rack, responding to a service ticket.

Watching the servers’ lights turn green, which indicates a successful connection, is his favorite part of the job.

“It might sound nerdy, but I like completing the connections,” said Casaca, who has a criminal justice degree and first worked as a security guard at a data center. “It gives me a sense of satisfaction.”

After seeing the camaraderie and ability to geek out on technology all day, he went back to school to get certified as a data center technician. Casaca’s unconventional path to working at a data center isn’t unique. Many workers who find jobs at data centers have no prior knowledge about the career.

Quietly tinkering in large, tucked-away warehouse-looking buildings, data center workers like Casaca are a vital part of a multibillion-dollar industry that makes digital systems run smoothly in modern society. These workers are critical to ensuring that digital services, network connections, data processing and storage seamlessly function to keep everything from grocery stores to hospitals to banking systems to even cellphones operating. The spotlight on them is increasingly coming into focus as companies around the world invest heavily in data centers amid the artificial intelligence boom. And competition for qualified talent is intensifying.

More than 468,000 people work at data centers in the United States, according to estimates PwC published in a report for the Data Center Coalition. Direct employment in data centers increased 17 percent from 2017 to 2021 compared with 2 percent in overall growth of U.S. employment during the same period. Analysts predict that revenue in the data center industry will grow exponentially as more companies invest in data centers to support their AI and cloud-computing initiatives. Amazon plans to invest $100 billion in data centers over the next 10 years, while Meta plans to spend up to $40 billion on digital infrastructure, including data centers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“People have the expectation in 2024 that tech is just going to work, almost like magic,” said Alex Lokey, 32, who works for the International Game Technology’s Pueblo, Colo., data center, which runs the data infrastructure for the Colorado lottery. “But there are a lot of things that go in on the back end to make sure it works and is consistent, and we’re some of the primary people for that.”

While a single data center doesn’t usually directly employ many — some can operate with 15 crew members or less during day shifts — the types of jobs vary from technical to more general roles like security guards. For higher-paying jobs that are more technical, salaries can range above $150,000, according to the Data Center Coalition.

Inside the black box

Lokey compares his job as a data center operator to that of a firefighter, without the physical danger. Many days he’s just on watchful alert, waiting for a fire, or in his case a technical issue like an outage, to set off alarms. When it happens, he’s on the front line. But a lot of people, some within his own social circle, have no idea what he does.