Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence data centers, creating an unprecedented development wave that is spreading to every corner of the U.S. But as data centers captivate the attention of the business world, it has become glaringly apparent the sector is remarkable in another way: It is mostly white and male. 
The pressure on data center providers to keep up with the explosive demand driven by Big Tech’s AI ambitions has led them to prioritize growth. The industry’s talent pipeline is already strained, and its hiring practices center on increasing its ranks by any means necessary to get the job done. Diversity, industry professionals say, has taken a back seat — even though those efforts could help solve the greater data center labor shortage issues. This has led data centers to fall behind other sectors that have made progress on bringing in women and people of color in recent years, and those pushing for more diversity worry it will have a hard time catching up. “The broader commercial real estate space doesn’t have the greatest diversity numbers, but it’s even more stark in the data center space,” said Bobby Little II, a Black data center professional based in Atlanta at NTT Global Data Centers Americas. Read the full story here. | 
