Owen Tucker-Smith

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69 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 3d ago

Owen Tucker-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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WSJ Tech News Briefing · The Workers Keeping AI Data Centers Running · 25 Sep 2026 podcast

So a lot of these data centers are run by one of these companies, in this case, Digital Realty, that makes and operates data centers and then leases out space to the Apples and the Oracles of the world.

They have these customers who are going to want to send in their own technicians.

And so if those technicians get stuck in bad weather, there are clots, there are showers, there's food for them to stay.

But yeah, I mean, it's a very unique job.

As you mentioned, they're huge.

So it's a very physical job just to get around.

One of the employees I talked to said,

that he logs around 30,000 steps a day, just getting from one end to the other to do his rounds, to check on everything.

Compared to other similar jobs at other companies, the pay is thought to be higher.

Indeed has done some analysis, at least for the maintenance hourly workers, that found that their wages were more than 40% higher than similar hourly maintenance jobs at other facilities.

At one of these companies, you might make, when you're first starting out as an engineer,

Looking after the equipment and doing maintenance, you might make around $66,000 at digital realty, but the more experienced roles will get up to around $120,000.

So there's room for growth.

But as I mentioned, a lot of these people are getting sort of significant raises from the similar jobs that they would have had at a non-realty.

data center company.

There's a lot of interest in the jobs, despite all the public backlash across the country to these facilities.

Indeed has tracked like an eightfold increase over the last few years of interest in the jobs.

So there does seem to be hunger to work in these places.

But I think there's still a lot of people who just have no idea what goes on inside of them.

The bar has lowered over time.

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