Digital Realty aims for 99.9999% uptime across 300-plus facilities
On a recent weekday at a Digital Realty data center in Ashburn, Virginia, lead engineer James Waddy — who grew up wanting to be a professional athlete — paced the raised floor above an air-circulation chamber that cools the servers beneath him, listening for trouble. “I don’t hear any noises,” said Waddy, 33. “I don’t smell anything. Everything’s running right.” The 33-year-old calls himself “The General” and oversees dozens of other engineers. His daily rounds include sniffing for burning equipment that could indicate overheating, feeling tubes for cracks, and looking for faulty lighting or broken power transformers — totaling 30,000 steps per shift through echoey hallways so long that some technicians ride scooters to get around.
The Ashburn facility sits in a dense cluster about an hour outside Washington, D.C., known as Data Center Alley. The nine-year-old building includes cots and showers for technicians who may need to shelter during extreme weather. Even with up to 120 people on site at peak — the facility employs about 50, with contracted security and customer employees adding to the total — many rooms were empty during the weekday tour.
Data-center hourly workers earn a roughly 42% pay premium compared with similar jobs at other kinds of businesses, according to research from the hiring website Indeed. A project manager at a data center makes around $115,000, Indeed found. Digital Realty said entry-level engineers at its facilities can make roughly $66,000, while average pay can top $120,000 for those with more experience. More than 1 million job seekers searched for data-center roles on Indeed this year, with August searches up eightfold from early 2022.
Data Center Map estimates roughly 2,700 operational U.S. data centers. Nearly 400 more are under construction nationwide, and at least 1,500 are in the planning stage. Individual facilities don’t require large staffs — estimates range from a few dozen to a few hundred permanent employees, depending on size — but the scale of the national build-out potentially translates to tens of thousands of workers.
The workforce is in tight supply. Professionals with skills in electrical systems, network engineering and cooling systems are in high demand, according to Brandi Galvin Morandi, chief people officer at data-center operator Equinix. In Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia Community College launched a program for data-center work with help from the private sector, and major tech companies including Meta Platforms have invested in training skilled workforces to build the facilities.
“These are mission-critical facilities running around the clock, and that takes a specific mix of technical training, safety discipline, and hands-on experience which is in short supply relative to how fast the industry is growing,” said Cindy Fiedelman, Digital Realty’s chief human resources officer. Digital Realty operates more than 300 data centers on six continents. At the Ashburn site, the company leases space to major tech companies that need computing power; customers include Oracle, Meta and IBM.
The Ashburn staff mixes white- and blue-collar roles — security guards, technicians who look after customers’ cable setups, supply-chain officers who source materials, and engineers who monitor for problems. Digital Realty estimates its data centers are operational 99.999% of the time, but it now aims for 99.9999% — a difference the company describes as six minutes of outage a year versus 30 seconds.
That push for reliability comes as operators face growing public pushback against new data-center construction. In Atlanta, Digital Realty has sought an exemption from a local ban on data centers near transit centers as it tries to build a $500 million center in the city. Locals have pushed back against the project, which is currently stuck in limbo. A company spokesman said the project would create well-paying jobs and that it was “committed to getting there the right way” in partnership with the community.
Some Ashburn workers say they are aware of the public debate swirling around their industry. Don Atkinson, 53, has worked at Digital Realty for about 14 years, following 17 years in the military and a job maintaining backup power systems. Now in a managerial role looking after younger engineers, he described the shift in public opinion as strange. “We love America, we love the country, we love the industry and it’s just weird,” said Atkinson, who noted he doesn’t use much AI himself. “It’s a weird place right now.”
Another worker, Malcolm Mosely, said his family sometimes brings up the politics of data centers, but he tries not to focus on it. “I just come here to do my job,” said Mosely, who on a recent Thursday was inside a black cage stuffed with yellow wires checking a cross-connect cable that links one customer’s operation to another’s.
Waddy has worked at the Ashburn plant for three years after earning an associate degree in business and working in sales at an HVAC company. He started on the data center’s night shift, helping maintain machinery for customers across the world, and has since climbed the ranks to lead engineer. His daily rounds include checking the facility’s air-handler gallery, where massive air conditioners pump cool air into the rest of the data center. The data hall upstairs looks like a locker room, with servers stacked on top of each other in cabinets or cages that companies can lease. There are no logos or company names inside, since competitors have operations running side-by-side; earplugs are encouraged to guard against the roaring sound from the servers when up close.
On the roof, Waddy checks on hundreds of condensers arranged in neat rows to help cool the facility, looking for any malfunctions or damage from birds that like to peck at equipment. The roof work comes with a view of a distant crane helping to build a competitor’s data center. “It’s nice up here,” Waddy said. “I love this round.”