When Charley Daitch, CEO of data center developer Rowan Digital Infrastructure, hires electrical engineers to come work for his company, he casts his net wide.
“We hire people from the engineering firms,” he said. “We hire people directly from the hyperscalers. …We’ll pull electrical engineers that have worked in power generation, or in substations. We’ll pull in civil engineers that have worked in other big industrial projects.”
This proactive approach towards recruiting is a reflection of how the AI infrastructure buildout is exacerbating a tightness in the labor market; even before ChatGPT arrived on the scene, the energy sector struggled to find all the skilled workers it needs.
As data centers, power companies, and utilities all compete for the same workforce, job postings have surged. Between 2023 and 2025, “power sector job posting for core roles rose 20%, while data center postings surged 64% — far outpacing the 4% growth in postings… across the broader economy,” according to a March 2026 report by Deloitte. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that employment for electrical and electronics engineers will grow 7% in the decade between 2024 and 2034, “much faster than the average for all occupations.”
In other words, electrical and electronics engineers have leverage over their potential employers.
Some of the things they’re achieving could be easily guessed at, such as higher salaries — the annual median wages for electrical and electronics engineers rose from $101,250 in 2019 to $118,780 in 2024 to $125,040 in 2025, according to BLS data — and better perks. For instance, Chuck Perrine, factory manager and VP of power transformer operations at Hitachi Energy, said the company has had to accommodate more remote work; Hitachi’s U.S. transformer plants are often in rural areas, where engineers don’t always want to live.
The situation also allows engineers to be more selective about how they want to spend their days. The huge growth in data centers is creating a divide, where engineering work in the more traditional world of utilities emphasizes depth and rigor, while working for a data center developer requires speed and nimbleness.
‘Breadth versus depth’
The speed and scale at which data centers and their supporting power infrastructure are being built require all hands on deck, and engineers working in the field often find themselves handling a bit of everything, from the electrical design books running hundreds of pages, to substation design and power procurement.
According to Daitch, this ability to work on a project from start to finish can be an attractive part of the job for those he recruits. “If you work for a big engineering shop, you finish the drawings, you hand it off to the customer, and your work is done,” Daitch said. “At Rowan, you have to see the project get built…People like owning the full outcome.”
This attitude also applies for companies developing the infrastructure and electronics adjacent to data centers. Shaun Pye is the power electronics team lead at IONATE, which develops smart transformers to maximize grid connection for large loads such as data centers. “We are looking for the type of engineers that can think more broadly because we are solving complex problems…and our solution is multidisciplinary,” Pye said. “There’s a huge value-add when someone can [take] the systematic and holistic view, as opposed to just a formal training path.”
Daitch describes this as a “breadth versus depth element,” which goes hand in hand with a desire to work on problems that haven’t been solved yet. And as the new game in town, AI data centers have plenty of those. As Daitch put it, “there’s not a definitive answer” to the question of what AI’s infrastructure requirements will be in 2029, for example. And that tolerance for risk simply isn’t there on the utility side of things.
“We are willing to make decisions with 80% of the information, as opposed to waiting for 100% of the information, and we have the luxury of doing that in our industry,” he added. “If you’re a power systems engineer responsible for keeping the grid up, you better have 100% of the information, or 99% at least.”
This is one of the “key factors” in why Pye left the automotive industry and joined IONATE. “The fundamental technology challenges for EVs have largely been solved,” he said, while grid integration is still a challenge, including when it comes to powering data centers. “I saw more fundamental problems to be solved there.”
This fact that a booming infrastructure industry can offer engineers more diversion and variety than more traditional sectors isn’t new. In fact, Larry Pileggi, head of Carnegie Mellon University’s electrical and computer engineering department, said that being asked to work on one thing exclusively is what made him leave his job as an engineer at electrical manufacturer Westinghouse Research and Development to pursue a PhD back in the 1980s.
“You become the expert at that and that makes you less likely to leave because you’re stuck in one place,” Pileggi said, adding that’s not what many of his students want. “If [somewhere like] PJM hires you and makes you the expert on some stagnant technology, that’s pretty much a dead-end job.”
Today, the young engineers at Carnegie Mellon and other top engineering programs who could do good work at utilities and ISOs are likely to be more interested in going to work in places like Google, not only because they pay them more, but because those companies actually do the kind of innovative research utilities don’t. And that’s a problem for an industry facing more dramatic change than it has seen in decades, one that’s in need of innovative thinking — and new employees — to meet the demands of the very loads that are taking its best potential candidates.
‘Frightening’ downsides
That said, data centers have their downsides. Madison Lazar, who works as a senior recruitment consultant for critical infrastructure and data centers at Airswift, said that the competitive pay data centers can offer comes with long hours as a feature of the job, especially now.
“We’re seeing that there’s an incredible turnover rate in data centers because the work hours are tremendous,” Perrine at Hitachi Energy confirmed. “It’s not unusual for someone to leave the data center field and join a different industry a couple years in because they’re working 70-hour weeks as a routine, because the challenges in front of them are so great.”
Daitch himself acknowledges that a utility job might be better for people at a moment in life when they’re prioritizing stability and picking up their kids from school.
But George Doyle, an engineering director at independent connection provider Nodus ICP, in the U.K., sees more serious downsides. Doyle himself left the utility side, after working for over 12 years at U.K. distribution network operator SP Energy Networks, because he wanted to “get more exposure to things outside of what was just the siloed responsibility within the DNO.”
The experience was “eye-opening,” Doyle said. “I would potentially go as far as saying frightening.”
The high demand for electrical engineers means that there are “people who could potentially be doing jobs that they’re not really qualified for,” he said. Furthermore, the gold rush of the AI infrastructure buildout is drawing in new companies that might not yet have the experience to undertake the level of technical complexity that power infrastructure projects require.
“Anyone can have a go at this without necessarily understanding the implications of how doing things in a certain way can create more risks,” Doyle said, and without having “the overall industry experience that large companies like DNOs and transmission operators have.”
These developers are working with potentially dangerous infrastructure. Utilities and transmission operators may be less exciting workplaces than a data center developer, but, as Doyle points out, they tend to keep a dedicated specialist on hand and enforce strict protocols that make it harder to cut corners or overlook something critical — which isn’t necessarily the case as newcomer developers try to get a slice of the AI boom for themselves.
It would be easy to assume that it’s primarily utilities that have something to learn from data centers about recruiting and retaining talent. They could be offering jobs that require more innovation, more variety, that give engineers a real stake in the sector’s boom time. But according to the engineers who have actually seen both sides of the industry, many new developers could stand to look to the power sector when it comes to hiring with longevity in mind: prioritize sustainability, safety, and the right person for the job.
The consequences of playing too fast and loose, Doyle emphasized, could be dire: “It’s not a slight at those companies. — iIt’s just that a lot of electrical safety is only understood when the worst thing happens.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected on August 21, 2026. An earlier version said that Larry Pileggi is head of Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering; he is actually the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering within the College.
