The US data centre pipeline just told us where the industry is heading next, and it isn't the markets everyone assumed.
JLL 's midyear 2026 North America Data Center Report found that 77 percent of the current construction pipeline now sits in what it calls frontier markets, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. Places that, until recently, had little to no data centre development history. Demand has doubled year-over-year, absorption hit a record 25GW in the first half of the year alone, and 66GW of capacity is now under construction, 95 percent of it already pre-committed. Vacancy has held at 1 percent for three straight years despite that pace of build. [1]
Capacity moves fast when the economics line up. A site gets selected, power gets secured, ground gets broken. Talent doesn't move at that speed. A market with no data centre history has no bench of commissioning engineers, no established base of high-voltage electricians, controls technicians and critical facilities engineers, no pipeline of EHS leads who know how to take a build from construction handover into live operations. That gap doesn't close on its own just because the buildout arrived. Someone has to build it, deliberately, alongside the construction schedule rather than after it.
And these frontier markets aren't blank slates. West Texas and Louisiana already have oil and gas, utilities and heavy industrial construction competing hard for the same electricians and controls technicians a data centre needs. Ohio and the Carolinas have established manufacturing and logistics sectors doing the same. A developer moving into these regions isn't finding untapped labour. It's entering a market where several industries are already fighting over the same skilled trades, and data centres are often the newest and least understood competitor in that fight.
JLL's report points to a second piece of this that matters just as much. Its research found that 79 percent of Americans support US leadership in AI, but only 14 percent support data centre development in their own community, a 65-point gap. JLL is right to call that a genuine constraint on the buildout the industry needs. Community acceptance isn't a communications problem to be managed after the fact. It's a factor that determines whether projects get built on schedule at all.
Workforce strategy sits right at the intersection of both of these challenges, and it's one of the few levers the industry actually controls. A developer moving into a frontier market can't change how much power is available or how fast a substation gets built. It can change whether the people doing the hiring understand the region, whether the roles created stay local, and whether the community sees the project as something built with them rather than dropped on them from outside.
The answer isn't simply finding more electricians. It's widening where they come from before the pressure hits. That means building relationships with technical colleges and apprenticeship programmes in these regions well before a project breaks ground, not once commissioning is six weeks out. It means looking at adjacent trades, electricians and controls technicians coming out of utilities, oil and gas or manufacturing, and giving them a credible path into data centres rather than waiting for candidates who already have the exact title on their CV.
Our very own Brittany Kee is a good example of what this looks like in practice. Based in Dallas and deeply embedded in the Texas market, Brittany sits on the board of NAWIC Dallas, the local chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction, where she works on championing diversity in the sector. It's her sustained, on-the-ground involvement that builds trust with the community and makes her a go-to contact in the market.
As the pipeline keeps pushing into Ohio, Louisiana, the Carolinas and beyond, that same approach becomes more important. The operators who treat local talent and local trust as one problem rather than two will move faster and run into less resistance than the ones who treat workforce as an afterthought to the construction schedule.
JLL's numbers make it clear how much capacity is coming and how quickly. What they don't answer is who's going to build, commission and run it in markets that have never done this before. That question doesn't get solved by the same playbook that worked in established hubs like Northern Virginia or Dallas-Fort Worth five years ago. It gets solved by knowing the region, being embedded in it, and building the pipeline before the pressure hits.
