It’s no secret that, since Generative AI products exploded into the market and public consciousness, big tech has been fighting a bitter war to secure top level AI talent. Stock options, benefits, and cash compensation have soared over the last three years, even for junior and mid-level AI talent. A year ago, Garett Gentry, an AI talent recruiter with experience at Meta, Palantir, Google and Amazon, told Fortune that he was seeing “offers of $350,000” for essentially entry level AI jobs becoming the industry standard — around $100,000 more than the year before. Meta was offering pay packages of up to $300 million over four years to secure top-tier AI talent last Summer. Sam Altman’s OpenAI wasn’t far behind.
Less than a year later, however, and the war for talent has opened up a new front.
As AI firms bet bigger and bigger on scaling their models — racing to build data centres the size of small towns in the race for more and more computing power — programmers aren’t the only labour pool in high demand.
Data centre builders are facing a severe shortage of skilled technicians as they attempt to secure the talent they need to keep pace with the scale and speed of the AI boom. Increasingly, organisations are building their own talent pipelines through apprenticeships and training in an effort to future proof their operations. But doing so successfully is a more complex undertaking than offering lucrative salaries to large swathes of graduates; it’s a complex balance between increasing company visibility, instilling culture and values, and training for the long haul rather than the short term pain points.
The Talent Gap
Late last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang predicted that “the big winners in the AI race will be electricians and plumbers.”
Already, it looks as though he was right, and the biggest tech firms are already feeling the pinch. Take Oracle, which is currently building out a series of gargantuan data centres intended to support the next phase of OpenAI’s growth, for example. Due to worker and material shortages, the cloud giant announced recently that it would have to delay the completion dates of several OpenAI facilities from 2027 to 2028.
The UK data centre pipeline is set to increase the number of facilities (currently around 480) by almost 100 in the near future as both the public and private sectors invest in shoring up the UK’s AI competitiveness. In Europe, total data centre floorspace is expected to exceed 10 million sq ft this year, up from just over six million sq ft in 2015, according to real estate firm Savills. And in 2026, more than $100 billion could be invested into the US’ ongoing data centre buildout.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the scale of demand for infrastructure is already driving up pay for construction workers, who earn salaries around £14,500 per year higher working on data centres compared to more traditional construction jobs. It’s no surprise considering the fact that, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group, the US construction industry is experiencing a shortage of approximately 439,000 workers, mostly skilled electricians and plumbers. In the UK, the Construction Industry Training Board predicts the country needs to recruit 50,300 extra workers every year for the next five years to plug the talent gap.
It’s a story playing out all over the data centre construction sector, where builders are often forced to choose between paying well over the odds for skilled engineers or enduring long waits. Sometimes, they end up having to settle for both.
Foundations of a Future-Proof Talent Pipeline
The talent gap isn’t going to go away on its own, and organisations across the data centre space are looking for ways to bolster their skilled labour pools sustainably for the long-term.
TES Power has built an apprenticeship pipeline not just to suit its vertically-integrated approach to manufacturing modular data centre power and switching equipment, but also its values and company culture. TES’ approach is shaped by its location. Northern Ireland has a long history as an engineering and manufacturing hub. Areas like Mid Ulster, where TES’ Cookstown headquarters are located, have one of the highest concentrations of manufacturing employment, with official analyses showing around 30 to 50% linked to the sector. The same manufacturing depth applies in the northwest, where TES operates a facility Ballykelly, reinforcing access to skilled talent and supply chains. Meanwhile, the local skills ecosystem continues to expand: engineering is consistently among the most popular apprenticeship frameworks and over 118,000 people were on ApprenticeshipsNI programmes as of April 2025, supporting employer pipelines like TES’.
TES Power is a young firm, but it sits in an area where critical trades are well established. Over the last three years, the workforce at TES’ Ballykelly site has swelled to more than 150. Unlike the majority of the data centre industry, the majority of those workers are under 40. A higher proportion than the industry average are women. One in ten is an apprentice.
Engineering a New Generation of Engineers
TES is building a future-proof workforce, which means hiring young and deliberately diversifying apprenticeship roles in an effort to create more well-rounded engineers. While an apprentice might begin with a specific trade discipline like electrical installation, their journey is structured so they both see and understand the whole picture.
Early-career hires are brought in with the expectation that their roles will evolve. It’s a model that does a lot to support progression from within. Workers who start as apprentices gain visibility across multiple stages of delivery, including site work, installation, testing, and commissioning. Advancement is linked to experience gained through rotation rather than time served alone.
Apprenticeship pathways have also been broadened beyond traditional trade definitions. Rather than training solely as electricians, apprentices develop as electrical engineers focused on data centre infrastructure. This reframing creates clearer long-term career trajectories and aligns early-career training with the fact that the industry of tomorrow may look very different to the industry we know today.
During their first three years, apprentices typically spend one day per week in formal education and four days in practical settings. A dedicated training manager oversees the programme. Initial months focus on foundational knowledge, including systems, processes, and safety. From there, apprentices rotate through manufacturing, installation, and engineering functions. Exposure includes both traditional electrical work and more engineering-intensive activities such as switchgear and modular systems.
Mechanical engineering apprentices begin on the shop floor, learning fabrication, sheet-metal work, and machine operation before progressing into programming and, later, design. By their third year, many transition into office-based design roles. Electrical apprentices follow a similar route, starting with mechanical assembly to understand how systems are constructed before moving into wiring, schematics, and testing.
Both pathways end up receiving exposure to the R&D process, where fresh perspectives are incredibly valuable. Experience matters, but TES has found that new people often ask “why” in ways that lead to better solutions.
There’s a holistic quality to the way TES approaches training its apprentices. While that includes exposing them to a wider array of skills and developmental pathways than more traditional apprenticeships, it’s also about instilling the right values and approach.
Culture plays a starring role in TES’ apprenticeship program. There’s a strong focus on consistency in communication and clarity of expectations. Innovation is a collective responsibility and a culture that creates space for discussion and experimentation encourages that. Put simply, culture matters, especially as the company scales. Communication and shared purpose prevent silos and keep everyone from apprentices to the C-Suite moving in the same direction.
As apprentices progress, multiple career paths emerge. Some remain on the shop floor, others move into testing, technical design, or project management roles that span delivery from concept to completion. The pace of the data centre sector provides rapid feedback loops, allowing individuals to see tangible outcomes from their work. That sense of impact, combined with project variety, supports retention.
Development, Retention, and the Future
The risks of underinvesting in talent development are already visible across the data centre industry.
Delays, disorganisation, and high price tags all threaten to prevent data centre builders from capitalising on the AI boom. Reactive recruitment can easily lead to quality issues, delayed delivery, and loss of organisational knowledge. By investing in a pipeline that hires, develops, and retains a new generation of engineers, companies like TES are already better prepared to deliver the next generation of data centre infrastructure — benefits that will compound as the decade continues and into the 2030s.
