A Perfect Match: Veteran Skills and Data Center Operations

When Salute was founded 13 years ago, our mission was based on two critical beliefs:

• The data center industry needs a highly-trained workforce that enables companies to rapidly scale their operations, and
• Military veterans have impactful skills that are perfectly suited to the rigorous operational environments of advanced data centers

Both of those are even truer now than they were back in our early days.

Today, the data center industry’s workforce crisis is larger than ever. CNBC recently reported that leading tech companies are spending $700 billion to build new data centers. But there currently aren’t enough workers to operate these massive investments. We need to expand the industry’s workforce by hundreds of thousands of skilled employees to keep pace with the rapid buildout of digital infrastructure in North America, Europe and globally.

Against that backdrop, the skillset that military veterans have become even more timely and valuable. These skills have always been impactful for our industry, but their value cannot be overstated in modern data center environments are reaching gigawatt-scale infrastructure with high-density environments full of systems with very precise operational needs.

Military veterans who worked in nuclear submarines and in Nimitz-class carriers are a perfect example. The specialized skills that these veterans have built working in these mission critical settings with high-density power systems and complex mechanical systems are directly applicable to advanced data centers. These skills are rare to find in civilians, which makes these veterans all the more valuable to our industry. By putting their experience and skills to work in data centers, these veterans can seamlessly transition to their post-military career in the private sector.

Veterans’ skills are also directly applicable to the highly-rigorous operational requirements of liquid-cooled data center environments. For decades, a cardinal rule in data centers was to never bring liquid into the facility. But today, direct-to-chip liquid cooling is necessary to manage the thermal needs of advanced chips in GPUs. Salute has developed the first operational model for AI data centers to mitigate the risks of liquid cooling, and military veterans are a perfect match for the meticulous operating procedures in these environments. Their discipline, technical skills, communication skills and ability to perform at an extraordinarily high level under pressure are invaluable for data centers supporting AI workloads.

There is so much more that veterans bring that directly align with data center operational needs. Operational readiness. Impeccable execution of safety protocols. Agile problem solving. Rapid response to emerging issues. Direct experience in industrial-scale electrical and HVAC systems. The ability to rapidly adopt and execute new SOPs. And rare collaborative and leadership skills that are impactful in mission critical operational environments.

Salute has helped more than 20,000 military-trained professionals to transition to successful careers in the data center industry. They are a cornerstone of the incredible workforce that operates this indispensable infrastructure for the global economy. Our goal is to double that by helping 10,000 more military veterans, active-duty military personnel, military reserve and military spouses begin their data center careers. We have launched the Salute Military Community Pathway to accomplish that goal as it perfectly compliments and takes our successful decade long Skillbridge Program to the next level.

To learn more, visit https://salute.com/resources/news/how-do-we-solve-the-workforce-crisis-hiring-and-training-thousands-of-military-veterans/.