Ninety percent of data center operators now name staffing shortages as a critical constraint on building or expanding facilities, according to Kelly’s 2026 Data Center Salary Guide, a gap wide enough that roughly half of the US data centers scheduled for delivery this year face delays or cancellation, most of it for reasons inside employers’ own control.
The staffing firm’s August 25 report found permanent data center employment on track to hit 650,000 roles in 2026, up 30% from 2023, with construction jobs alone projected to exceed 180,000 through 2028. A quarter of current data center personnel are actively poached by competing operators every year. The hardest roles to fill are specialized rather than entry-level, liquid cooling commissioning technicians, medium-voltage electricians and GPU cluster operators, with pay climbing accordingly and salaries for data center operations leaders now hitting a national midpoint of $178,000. “The biggest constraint on data center growth is no longer just power, land, or equipment. It’s talent,” said Joel Leege, President of Kelly Science, Engineering, Technology & Telecom.
The insight most talent teams are missing is where the fix has to come from. Jake Rasweiler, Kelly’s Senior Vice President for Data Centers and Digital Infrastructure, put it directly: “The challenge isn’t simply finding more people. The industry needs to expand the talent pool.” That is the same conclusion HRTech drew when covering the broader skilled trades talent gap and the widening AI skills wage premium earlier this year: pipelines built around adjacent trades, electricians, HVAC technicians and telecom infrastructure workers, retrained into data center specialties, rather than competing for the same fixed pool of certified specialists that every hyperscaler and colocation operator is already bidding up.
Source: Kelly Services
