Written by Alexander Onn, Head of Data Center Construction US (East).
Commissioning proves the power, cooling, and life-safety systems in a data centre actually work before it goes live. It's a small, specialist discipline, and AI is putting more pressure on it than it's ever had. The systems are becoming more complex, with rack power densities increasing from 5-15kW to now 300-600kW. These are fuelled by GPU training clusters in AI data centers and it's just the beginning. Every jump like this changes conductor sizing, cooling design, grounding, and emergency power. Commissioning teams have to validate all of it.
The code is catching up in real time. NEC 2026 has carved medium-voltage grounding and bonding out into its own article, Article 270, built specifically for AI-driven power demands. Data centres now have a compliance framework that didn't exist a cycle ago, and so the competence and education of this limited talent pool is operating with an even higher demand.
The talent gap is only getting worse.
Power density is roughly doubling every year. The talent to design, validate, and commission that power isn't doubling with it. Some in the industry now argue talent, not power supply or chip availability, will be the real ceiling on AI scaling.
The numbers back it up. Uptime Institute's 2025 Staffing and Recruitment Survey puts hiring in the top three challenges facing operators. 51-53% can't find qualified candidates, depending on the year, and that number has climbed every year since 2018.
And it's about to get thinner. Roughly a third of the technical commissioning workforce in the US is at or near retirement, concentrated in power systems engineering and high-voltage electrical work, the exact disciplines commissioning runs on.
The global data centre commissioning market was valued at $3.18 billion in 2025 and is growing at an 8.3% CAGR through 2034, putting it on track to grow roughly 17% in the next two years alone.
The same research names a shortage of skilled commissioning professionals as a direct restraint on that growth.
The market is expanding faster than the workforce that has to deliver it!
Where the talent actually comes from
Everyone's fishing in the same small pond of candidates with direct hyperscale commissioning history. That pool isn't growing.
The better hires often come from outside it entirely. Healthcare, semiconductor, and utility backgrounds all produce people who've done high-stakes, highly regulated system validation, just not in a data centre. What transfers isn't the sector on their CV. It's judgment: knowing which requirements are non-negotiable and which can be built up with the right team around them.
That's a call a job board can't make. It takes someone who knows the sector well enough to see the transferable skill before the resume does.
That's the gap Thor is closing with our several partners today.
Keeping the talent is the even harder problem, so let's talk retention.
Placing commissioning talent is one fight. Keeping it is another, and most operators lose more people to poor retention than to a thin market.
What people are actually weighing when they consider staying or leaving:
- Total compensation package - not just base salary, but per diems, bonuses, and how the package compares across competing offers
- Travel structure - how much time on the road, how it's scheduled, and whether it's sustainable long term
- Regional focus - projects closer to home versus constant relocation
- Size and scale of projects - the calibre of work on their CV matters to career-minded engineers
- Company culture - how they're treated, managed, and supported day to day
- Investment in training and education - whether the employer is building their technical skill set or just extracting it
- Career progression - a visible path to senior and leadership roles, not just the next project
CX firms who win on hiring but lose on these fronts end up back in the same market six months later, competing for the same shrinking pool.
The firms that hold onto commissioning talent are the ones solving for all seven, not just the paycheck.
About Alexander
Alexander Onn is Head of Construction (US East) at Thor. With 7 years of recruitment experience, Alexander specializes in commissioning — one of the most high-demand and talent-constrained disciplines in the data center sector. He partners with general contractors, subcontractors, and owner operators to place the engineers and managers who make critical infrastructure projects go live. As AI-driven workloads push power densities and technical complexity to new levels, Alexander's ability to identify transferable talent from adjacent sectors gives clients a meaningful edge in an increasingly constrained market.
