This is the second in a series of articles exploring the facts behind the data center debate. Read part one here, and download our full eBook, The Truth About Data Centers, for a deeper look at the issues covered in this series.
Data centers are in the news for reasons that make a lot of people uncomfortable. New facilities are appearing in communities that weren’t expecting them. Electricity bills are rising. Questions about water use, noise, and neighborhood impact are real and deserve straight answers.
These are legitimate concerns, and DataBank is committed to addressing them directly rather than letting the debate outpace the facts.
Your Day Is Already Running on This Infrastructure
Most people think of essential infrastructure as the things they can see: power lines, water towers, roads and bridges. Data centers belong in that same category but they’re invisible by design. What powers your phone, your bank app, and your streaming service is a building full of servers running somewhere, around the clock, every day of the year.
Think about a typical day. Your alarm goes off, you check the weather, scan your email, and order coffee through an app on your way out the door. Every one of those interactions touches a data center. So does the navigation that reroutes your commute, the video call you join at the office, the prescription your pharmacy fills automatically, and the news alert that arrives while you’re making dinner.
By the time you fall asleep, you’ve touched data center infrastructure thousands of times. This is the infrastructure required for modern life as we all know it, and stepping away from it, even for a day, isn’t really an option anymore.
Download our full eBook, The Truth About Data Centers, for a deeper look at the facts behind the concerns communities are raising.
What 24 Hours Without Them Would Look Like
Data centers aren’t a new invention. They powered the early internet, enabled Web 2.0, made smartphones possible, brought streaming into living rooms, and kept businesses running when the world went remote during the pandemic. For decades, they have been the foundation beneath every major shift in how we live and work.
AI is the latest chapter in that story, accelerating demand faster than anyone anticipated, but the dependency was already there long before the first ChatGPT query was ever typed.
Consider what a single day without data centers would actually look like:
Stock markets halt and payroll systems go offline
At the office, shared documents are inaccessible and video calls won’t connect
Cash becomes the only payment option, at lunch, at the gas station, everywhere
Hospitals work from paper records and flights are grounded
The 911 dispatch system runs on backup protocols
Weather forecasting goes dark, and GPS navigation becomes unreliable
Your bank balance is inaccessible, and online pharmacies can’t fill prescriptions
This list doesn’t stop there. Data centers are woven into the fabric of modern life in ways most people never have reason to consider.
None of this is speculation about what might happen someday. It reflects what modern life already depends on and why getting this right matters for everyone.
The demand was already substantial before AI arrived. Now it is growing faster than at any point in the history of the internet.
Growth and Responsibility Aren’t Opposites
We understand why rapid data center expansion raises questions. It’s visible, it’s fast, and it’s happening in communities already managing real pressures around energy costs and land use. Those concerns are valid, and responsible operators have an obligation to take them seriously rather than expect the public to simply accept growth as inevitable.
Understanding why the demand exists is only part of the conversation. The questions communities are raising go further, touching on electricity costs, strain on local power grids, water consumption, and the overall impact of large facilities moving into their neighborhoods. Those concerns deserve the same honest, fact-based treatment as the demand argument.
In the next article in this series, we take a closer look at one of the most frequently misunderstood pieces of that puzzle: the relationship between data centers and your electricity bill.
Want to stay ahead of the trends shaping digital infrastructure? DataBank Digest delivers analysis, insights, and the latest news from the world of colocation and digital infrastructure.
Technical teams working in a fast-paced environment now face increasing pressure to adapt quickly while maintaining the highest standards for operational excellence. Traditional approaches to leadership, such as the command-and-control model, simply can’t keep up with the speed of change now required in most modern organizations.
The good news is that there is a solution. Collaborative leadership has now emerged as a proven way to manage teams, increase productivity and efficiency, and drive innovation throughout the entire organization. Understanding what it actually looks like in practice — and why it matters more now than ever — is worth the attention of any leader responsible for a technical team.
What is Collaborative Leadership?
Simply put, it’s a model that allows managers to work alongside employees they oversee, rather than directing them from above. Collaborative leaders often contribute to projects and challenges outside their own team or department, which promotes cross-functional cooperation and a shared sense of purpose across the organization. We’ve found that it also makes decisions a team effort, as employees and managers work together in every department to find the most effective solutions for achieving their goals.
This stands in deliberate contrast to command-and-control leadership, where the manager holds information, sets direction, and evaluates outcomes largely from a distance. In that model, teams execute. In a collaborative model, teams contribute to the problem framing, the solution design, and the evaluation of results. The leader’s job becomes less about having the right answers and more about creating the conditions in which the right answers can surface.
The Need for More Agile Leadership
AI is just one example of outside factors that now force organizations to be prepared to shift and pivot faster than ever before. Consider the case of ChatGPT, and how it surprised many companies with its launch in November 2022.
ChatGPT and other generative AI models instantly made entire business processes obsolete while creating new competitive advantages virtually overnight. For example, leaders who once spent months planning years-long digital transformation initiatives suddenly found themselves racing to integrate AI tools as quickly as possible.
That dynamic has only intensified. Organizations are now navigating AI integration not as a one-time initiative, but as a continuous operational reality, and technical teams are at the center of it. Top-down leaders create bottlenecks in that environment. Collaborative leaders move faster, because their teams are already engaged as strategic partners rather than waiting for direction from above.
For sales operations teams, for example, AI represents this new reality of constant adaptation. This is especially true with how leaders must operate with their technical teams. They must change how they operate with technical teams and direct reports. This means abandoning rigid, top-down management approaches in favor of more collaborative leadership initiatives that engage teams as strategic partners in solving complex challenges.
Today’s business environment demands constant process modification and daily course correction. What worked yesterday won’t necessarily work tomorrow. Successful leaders must embrace this uncertainty through collaborative leadership, by working with their teams to set strategic direction. From there, they need to identify or develop the best tools and processes to support new efforts and drive better results.
Cross-Functional Collaboration in Action
DataBank recently went through the need for a new leadership approach with an internal asset transformation project. We used to rely on a manual process to enter customer information into our ERP, database, and other internal systems. The effort took too much time and effort and often led to inconsistent or missing information in each system. While it was challenging whenever we added a new customer, it became more of an obstacle when DataBank acquired another data center company that used different systems.
We recognized that there was an opportunity to improve this process. We worked with many other departments and assembled a cross-functional team, including development, data center operations, and sales operations. The cross-functional team collaborated to design and build an internal application that could standardize and transform this inherited data into our unified product catalog architecture.
The approach paid off dramatically. The team identified specific pain points in the manual transformation process, assembled the right resources, and developed an application to automate and streamline our asset transformation workflow. More importantly, the solution provided complete visibility across departments. Data center technicians could see everything they need in one place, creating a holistic view of customer relationships and standardized asset information.
Best of all, this project had a positive impact on DataBank’s customers, too. The new system revealed situations where customers were missing services that could enhance their operations and created new opportunities to provide better service and support. This kind of comprehensive improvement only happens when teams truly collaborate instead of working in isolated silos.
Overcoming Common Leadership Mistakes
In my experience, one of the most consistent mistakes leaders make is thinking only about their team’s specific role. By focusing only on their departmental responsibilities, they tend to overlook opportunities to contribute beyond their immediate role. Every company has similar functional groups, but too often they fail to work together effectively, missing the chance to create something greater than the sum of their individual parts.
Consider a sales operations team that identifies a recurring friction point in how customer data moves between systems. A siloed leader flags it as someone else’s problem. A collaborative leader brings the right people to the table, frames it as a shared challenge, and helps drive a solution none of them could have reached independently. That’s the trusted advisor role in practice.
This represents an underappreciated leadership skill: the ability to serve as a trusted advisor who can collaborate beyond traditional boundaries. Leaders must help their teams understand how their work connects to larger organizational goals and customer outcomes.
Successful collaborative leadership rests on cultural principles that enable trust and open communication. For example, DataBank’s culture encourages leaders to assume positive intent as a specific behavior. This means operating under the assumption that everyone is doing his best work. If things slip through the cracks, it’s more productive to believe that it’s not due to the employee’s lack of desire to get it right, but instead, the natural challenges found in fast-moving, complex environment.
Essential Skills for Technical Leadership
Partnership and collaboration are the most critical leadership skills a leader can have today, especially in technical environments. When traditional approaches aren’t working and your proverbial toolbox is empty, leaders have to get creative and find new ways to partner with others in the organization. This requires a balance of humility and resourcefulness as you acknowledge that you may not have the answers, but you’re committed to finding solutions.
Effective collaborative leadership also includes establishing a clear vision of the end result and the value it can deliver. Teams need to understand that if they execute specific actions, it will lead to meaningful benefits for internal departments and groups, and, most importantly, for customers and prospects. This vision provides the “why” behind the collaborative effort and helps sustain momentum through even the most challenging periods.
The advice for developing collaborative leadership skills can be summarized in three key principles: be fixed in what you know, flexible so you can grow, and willing to “freelance” when necessary. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know and have to learn on the job, but that’s part of the process.
Putting It into Practice
Developing collaborative leadership skills comes down to three essential principles:
Be fixed in what you know. Maintain confidence in your core expertise and strategic direction.
Stay flexible so you can grow. Remain open to new approaches and learning from your team.
Be willing to “freelance” when necessary. Step outside traditional management boundaries when situations demand it.
These foundational elements also support another one of DataBank’s key leadership behaviors: “collaborate before you escalate.” Rather than immediately pushing problems up the hierarchy, teams are empowered to work together to find solutions. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know and have to learn on the job, but that’s exactly what makes collaborative leadership so powerful.
Collaborative leadership with technical teams isn’t just a nice-to-have management approach anymore. It’s become essential for organizations that need to innovate quickly while maintaining operational excellence. Leaders who master this approach will find their teams more engaged, their processes more efficient, and their results more impactful.
The key is remembering that collaboration isn’t simply about bringing people together — it’s about creating conditions where diverse expertise combines to solve problems no individual could tackle alone. At DataBank, we’ve seen that play out in cross-functional work that improves internal efficiency, deepens customer relationships, and strengthens our culture. As AI continues reshaping what technical teams are responsible for, that approach will only matter more.
At DataBank, doing the right thing does not always mean doing the easy thing. That belief was put to the test three years ago, when construction on two of our Atlanta data center facilities turned up something unexpected and set in motion one of the most meaningful environmental initiatives in our company’s history.
When Construction Met Conservation
While breaking ground on the property, we discovered Georgia Asters growing on the site. This rare wildflower is listed as a threatened species by the State of Georgia and serves as a critical late-season food source for Monarch butterflies during their annual migration. Pollinators like the Georgia Aster play an important role in our food supply since roughly one-third of the fruits and vegetables we consume depend on a healthy pollinator ecosystem.
To protect the threatened Georgia Aster discovered on our property, DataBank partnered with Pollinator Partnership to create a thriving native habitat in its place.
When development clears large tracts of land, the ecosystems and migration pathways pollinators depend on can disappear with them. Replacing them with a protected natural habitat matters well beyond the environment. In many cases, it is essential to preserving the food systems communities depend on.
We could have cleared the flowers from the site and moved on. Instead, we carefully relocated them to a protected area of the property, even though no regulation required us to do so. It was the right call, and it planted the seed for something bigger.
Building a Pollinator Habitat from the Ground Up
That decision led us to Pollinator Partnership, the leading nonprofit dedicated to protecting pollinator habitats across North America. Working with their team, we replaced what could have been vast areas of water-intensive sod grass on the property with a native wildflower mix that is better for the local ecosystem and more sustainable to maintain.
This past week, we took that commitment a step further by planting a manicured pollinator garden at the front entrance of two of our Atlanta facilities. It was a true community effort, with Atlanta-area DataBankers, local community members, and representatives from our neighbors at the American Legion all picking up shovels.
The work was not easy. The DataBank property sits in an area known as Boulder Park for good reason, and digging more than 60 holes through dense, rock-strewn Georgia red clay meant everyone earned their keep. More than a few people took a turn with the pickaxe.
The DataBank Way
Projects like this one reflect something we think about often: what it means to be a responsible neighbor in the communities where we operate. It would have been easier, and entirely legal, to clear that original patch of Georgia Asters without a second thought. We chose a different path.
DataBank employee-owners roll up their sleeves to plant a native pollinator garden at our Atlanta data center campus, part of our ongoing environmental stewardship efforts.
What started as a small act of environmental care has grown into a model for how we approach land stewardship across our portfolio. We are grateful to our sustainability team, our construction and landscape partners at Kimley Horn and Brasfield & Gorrie, the representatives from Pollinator Partnership, and the many DataBankers and community members who showed up and got their hands dirty. This one was a team effort in every sense.
Want to learn more about how DataBank is investing in the communities where we operate? Visit our Community Relations page or explore DataBank Digest for more stories about our people, our partners, and the neighborhoods we’re proud to call home.
This past April, DataBank employee-owners across several markets stepped away from their desks and into their communities, marking Earth Day with hands-on volunteer work that ranged from environmental cleanups to sustainable farming.
Three DataBankers headed out early to volunteer at BonTon Farms Extension in Dallas, lending a hand with morning chores that included milking goats, feeding chickens, trellising new tomato plants, and weeding garden beds — a full day’s commitment that the team embraced.
A DataBank employee works on a step ladder inside a greenhouse at Bonton Farms Extension, a 40-acre urban farm in Dallas.
Bonton Farms is a South Dallas nonprofit on a mission to disrupt food insecurity in one of the city’s most underserved communities. Its Extension Farm spans 40 acres and serves as both a working farm and an educational platform, introducing volunteers to animal husbandry, sustainable gardening, and the importance of rotating fields. The farm supplies local farm-to-table restaurants while also connecting neighbors to fresh, healthy food that has historically been out of reach.
DataBankers’ efforts helped keep the farm’s daily operations running smoothly — from ensuring animals are fed and cared for on schedule to keeping garden beds productive for the season ahead. On a working farm serving a community in need, that kind of reliable volunteer support makes a tangible difference.
Cleaning Up Clear Creek in Denver
For the third consecutive year, DataBank’s Denver team joined a local Earth Day cleanup organized by Protect Our Rivers, working alongside roughly 300 volunteers to remove more than 5,000 pounds of trash from Clear Creek. That is a meaningful result for a waterway that runs through the heart of the Denver metro area.
DataBank’s Denver team gathers after removing more than 5,000 pounds of trash from Clear Creek during an Earth Day cleanup with Protect Our Rivers.
Clear Creek winds more than 60 miles from the Continental Divide through the Denver metro before joining the South Platte River, making it a popular corridor for outdoor recreation that depends on exactly this kind of community stewardship to stay healthy and accessible.
Protect Our Rivers organizes volunteer events throughout Colorado focused on restoring and protecting the state’s rivers and watersheds. For DataBank’s Denver team, showing up three years running is less a tradition than a commitment.
Hitting the Trails in Tysons, Northern Virginia
DataBank’s Northern Virginia teams marked Earth Day with a trail cleanup at Scott’s Run Trail in Tysons, Virginia, and the timing carried extra significance. The event also coincided with the 150th anniversary of the Tysons area, making it a community moment as much as an environmental one. For many on the team, it was their first volunteer outing together.
Among the more interesting finds along the trail: baseballs, a lawn chair, old street signs, and what appeared to be the remains of a campsite. The team made a day of it, with lunch together afterward.
Five DataBank employees prepare to clean up Scott’s Run Trail in Tysons, Virginia, as part of an Earth Day volunteer outing.
Scott’s Run Trail is part of the Scotts Run Stream Valley Park system in Fairfax County, offering a green corridor in one of the most densely developed areas of Northern Virginia. It is a good reminder that preserving that kind of space requires ongoing care from the people and organizations that call the area home.
Coming Up in May
This month, DataBank will once again bring its Kindness in Action campaign to life as employee-owners, customers, and community partners come together to assemble Kindness Kits for women and people experiencing homelessness. The kits are distributed to local shelters across multiple DataBank markets — a hands-on effort organized by the Women of DataBank employee resource group that grows in participation each year.
Also in May, DataBank will serve as a community sponsor of the 4th Annual 7×24 Cloud Run on Saturday, May 30, in Ashburn, Virginia. The race route runs alongside DataBank’s Northern Virginia data centers, and the event brings together data center professionals, families, and neighbors for a fun, casual day in the community. Options include a 4.999K race and a one-mile fun run. More information and registration are available here.
DataBank Cares: Giving Back Is What We Do
From blood drives and food donations to assembling Kindness Kits, writing letters to deployed troops, and supporting STEM education in underserved communities, DataBankers across the country have consistently shown up for the people and places around them. That commitment does not stop after these events.
To learn more about DataBank’s community partnerships and employee volunteer initiatives, visit our Community Relations page.
Want to learn more about how DataBank is investing in the communities where we operate? Visit our Community Relations page or explore DataBank Digest for more stories about our people, our partners, and the neighborhoods we’re proud to call home.
In a recent webinar, DataBank’s cloud team examined the market forces reshaping enterprise infrastructure decisions and made the case for why a choice-based cloud strategy now represents the most resilient path forward. Watch the full webinar here.
Something shifted in enterprise IT over the past two years that goes beyond a typical market cycle. Equipment costs have risen three to four times in the span of roughly four months, VMware licensing has gone from a stable line item to a budget-breaking variable, and the hyperscaler bills that organizations once accepted as the price of flexibility are now drawing hard scrutiny from finance teams who want to understand what, exactly, they are getting for the spend.
The disruption is real, but what makes this moment particularly difficult for IT leaders is not just the increased cost. It is that the pressure has arrived without a clear resolution in sight, leaving organizations to navigate a complex set of strategic and operational questions that most were not expecting to face on this timeline.
For most of its history, VMware was the default answer to enterprise virtualization, not always because organizations made a deliberate choice but because it was so deeply embedded in infrastructure, integrations, and institutional knowledge that it functioned more like assumed infrastructure than a vendor relationship. Deep third-party support, a mature ecosystem, and a generation of IT professionals trained on its platforms reinforced that position year after year.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023 changed the terms of that relationship in ways most enterprises were not prepared for.
The transition from perpetual licenses to a per-core subscription model, combined with the consolidation of VMware’s reseller program, sent licensing costs sharply higher for organizations that had built their infrastructure around a pricing model they expected to remain stable. What had been a known, manageable cost became an unpredictable one, and in some cases, a prohibitive one.
That shift arrived alongside an unrelated but equally disruptive spike in equipment costs. Hardware that enterprises refreshed on predictable cycles is now three to four times more expensive than it was just months ago, and the math that once validated on-premises infrastructure, colocation strategies, and hyperscaler commitments no longer holds in the same way.
More Than a Cost Problem
While cost pressure gets the bulk of the attention, it is not the whole story. What makes this moment genuinely difficult for IT leaders is that the disruption has no obvious resolution. Today, enterprises are wrestling with a wide range of unresolved questions:
Whether moving workloads off hyperscalers will actually reduce costs, or simply swap one set of tradeoffs for another
How to evaluate alternative hypervisor vendors — Nutanix, Proxmox, KVM-based options, Hyper-V — without lab environments to test them against production workloads
How to rationalize OpEx versus CapEx decisions when neither model carries a clear advantage
How to address security and compliance requirements that add complexity to every platform conversation
Through all of it, enterprises are trying to avoid deepening the vendor lock-in that created their current exposure. Yet it’s important to note that doing nothing is not a neutral position. It means continuing to absorb rising licensing costs and escalating equipment expenses while the window for proactive planning slowly closes.
Those concerns were reflected during the webinar, where a live audience poll asked attendees to identify their top cloud-related challenge. Rising infrastructure costs, hypervisor licensing increases, and security and compliance pressures all tied for the top spot.
Choice ensures the right platform for every workload, without compromise, where your performance needs, licensing impacts, support models, budget expectations, and future scaling plans all align.
Choice Is the New Enterprise Cloud Strategy
The enterprises navigating this environment most effectively share a common orientation. Rather than making a single large bet on one vendor or one cloud model, they are building infrastructure strategies designed for optionality, placing each workload on the platform where it performs best while preserving the ability to evolve as conditions change.
This is the principle DataBank explored in a recent webinar of the same name. The central argument is that choice delivers lower risk, lower cost, higher control, and no lock-in. More specifically, choice ensures the right platform for every workload without compromise, where performance needs, licensing impacts, support models, budget expectations, and future scaling plans all align.
The era of defaulting to a single hypervisor or cloud model is not over because those models were wrong. It is over because the market has changed in ways that reward flexibility and penalize lock-in. Organizations now need infrastructure partners capable of helping them adapt, not just absorb the impact.
DataBank’s recent webinar breaks down the market forces reshaping enterprise infrastructure decisions — and what a choice-based approach looks like in practice. Watch the replay now.
The Right Platform for Every Workload
The DataBank Cloud platform gives enterprises four distinct options: Multi-Tenant Cloud, Private Cloud, Bare Metal, and FedRAMP Cloud. Across those platforms, customers can mix and match hypervisors — VMware, Nutanix, and Proxmox — based on what each workload actually requires, without re-architecture, disruption, or lock-in.
To illustrate what that flexibility means in practice, DataBank’s team walked through a specific cost comparison during the webinar. An energy company running its entire environment on VMware was spending $18,000 per month. By migrating appropriate workloads to Proxmox while keeping its ERP system on VMware, where the integrations justified the licensing cost, the company could reduce monthly spend to $12,200 — a reduction of nearly 32 percent.
Watch the Webinar
If your organization is wrestling with rising VMware licensing costs, uncertainty about the right cloud direction, security and compliance pressures, or the need to align infrastructure strategy with budget constraints, the webinar offers a practical framework for thinking through each of them. Watch the replay: Choice Is the New Enterprise Cloud Strategy now.
Stay current on the latest thinking around enterprise cloud strategy, infrastructure flexibility, and the evolving hypervisor landscape. Visit DataBank Digest for analysis, insights, and the latest news from the world of colocation and digital infrastructure.
DataBank recently partnered with the Culpeper Technical Education Center (CTEC) in Culpeper, Virginia, as part of its ongoing commitment to engage and support the communities where we operate Over two days, this hands-on program gave 40 electrical students an up-close look at the data center industry and the career opportunities it holds.
CTEC electrical students and DataBank team members tour the Culpeper campus currently under construction during a two-day career exploration program.
The Culpeper program is part of the same commitment: The view that being a good neighbor means investing in the people and places where we build and operate.
A Community Partnership Takes Shape
CTEC is a career and technical education school located directly across the street from our new Culpeper data centers currently under construction. Its electrical program students had built an impressive lab model of a data center data hall, complete with raised floors, electrical power and distribution systems, low-voltage and network cabling and conduit, backup power, cages, servers, and more.
DataBank wanted to support CTEC students and help expand their understanding of the data center industry. We saw an opportunity to do what good neighbors do: Open our doors, share what we know, and give these students a firsthand look at an industry that needs their talents.
Day One: Meeting the Students and the Site
On the first day, we brought together a team spanning operations and construction to make the trip to CTEC. Matthew Uveges, Regional Director of Data Center Operations for the Mid-Atlantic Region, and Thomas Barrett, Project Manager for our Culpeper campus, represented the hands-on expertise these students were hungry to learn from. We were welcomed by CTEC Principal Shaun Summerscales, Electrical Instructor Doug Keaton, and Bryan Rothamel, Director of Economic Development at Culpeper County and the Culpeper Tech Zone.
CTEC electrical students get an inside look at a fully operational DataBank facility in Ashburn, Virginia, during the second day of their career exploration program.
The DataBank team met with 40 Level 1 and Level 2 electrical students ranging in age from 16 to 18. After an overview of the data center business, Uveges and Barrett evaluated the students’ data hall model, offering feedback and noting how closely their work reflected a real-world facility.
The group then boarded a bus across the street to tour the Culpeper campus, where they met with construction teams and contractors, walked the site, and took in the scale of two facilities under development: a 72MW building currently under construction as well as planned 120MW data center.
Day Two: Seeing the Finished Product
On the second day, the older Level 2 students, those nearing graduation, traveled by bus to Ashburn to visit two of our operational facilities, IAD1 and IAD3, and see what a completed, fully operational data center looks like.
They met with Patrick Greene (Data Center Manager, IAD3), James Mathes (Data Center Manager, IAD1), and Mike Ocampo and Isaiah Benjamin (Data Center Technicians, IAD3), who shared their experiences and offered firsthand perspective on careers in data center operations. The conversations covered everything from day-to-day responsibilities and shift work to career progression, certifications, and what employers actually look for when hiring technicians.
Students also got a candid look at how their electrical training maps directly to the skills needed on the data center floor, and how quickly that training can translate into a stable, well-paying career.
From Blueprint to Operations: A Complete Picture in 48 Hours
In just two days, these students experienced the full arc of a data center: from a 30-foot-long lab model, to a 100-acre campus under construction, to a fully operational 40MW facility. They heard directly from construction and operations professionals about how their electrical training translates into immediate, well-paying careers in a growing industry.
That kind of end-to-end experience is rare, and it doesn’t happen without the right people saying yes. We’re grateful to the CTEC faculty and Culpeper County leadership for making this partnership possible, and proud of the DataBank team members who gave their time and expertise to make it meaningful.
Culpeper is one of more than 25 markets where DataBank operates across the United States, and programs like this reflect how we think about our role in each of them. Building data centers is what we do. Being a good neighbor is who we are. Whether that means opening our doors to students in Atlanta, bringing 3D printers to a library in Red Oak, or spending two days with 40 young people in Culpeper who are about to launch their careers, we believe the communities we operate in deserve more than our infrastructure. They deserve our investment.
We look forward to continuing our relationship with CTEC and finding new ways to support workforce development, STEM education, and career opportunity in Culpeper and beyond.
Want to learn more about how DataBank is investing in the communities where we operate? Visit our Community Relations page or explore DataBank Digest for more stories about our people, our partners, and the neighborhoods we’re proud to call home.
