Owen Tucker-Smith
speaker
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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It used to be they wanted high expertise electricians, people who had worked in HVAC or sort of a similar field at a different kind of facility or a data center, that you would be kind of a specialized data center employee, which would involve knowing how to deal with
with the cables and this high tech machinery, or having supply chain expertise to source the materials.
But we have a shortage of electricians in the US now, a shortage of a lot of these kind of blue collar trades.
And so the companies are looking kind of to younger and younger people to fill these roles.
In Ashburn, Virginia, which is really the hub of data centers in America, they have partnered with the local community college, which has actually set up a degree program for data center work.
So
The idea is you can go to people who are 18 and 19 years old and maybe don't know what they want to do for their careers and say, this is a booming industry and there's going to be a lot of jobs and we can teach you how to do it.
So more and more often they're finding people who don't have a lot of these skills and trying to teach them, which they're going to have to do because even...
If these facilities do only employ 100 people, when you think about how many of them there are in the pipeline, that's still going to be a lot of very specific skilled jobs that they're going to have to fill over the next decade.
I think it's a really weird time to work at a data center, especially for the people who've worked there for a couple of decades, because data centers aren't new.
These facilities have been operating for many, many years to just power broadband and internet and everything and keep the ATM working and run the very mundane tasks of our lives.
These people, when I would ask them about the politics of it all, they never used to get these questions.
They would tell their friends and family that they worked at a data center and people would just like blink.
They wouldn't care.
They wouldn't really know what that meant.
You know, and now you tell your friends or family that you work at a data center and...
It's a conversation.
So I think it's very strange to see your job not necessarily change, but the reaction change a lot.
And I think some people feel a little bit offended by it all.
They feel like they're running America's Internet and now all of a sudden people have such strong emotions about it.
Showing 41–60 of 69 · page 3 of 4
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