When Agnes presented at Energy Taiwan 2025, she wasn’t delivering a market overview to a room of people who needed one.
The developers, investors and operators in that room already knew the headline numbers. What they wanted to talk about, and what kept coming up in the conversations before and after, was something more specific and more urgent: where are the people going to come from?
That’s the question this piece is here to answer.
The scale of APAC’s data centre expansion
APAC’s data centre market is on a trajectory that would be difficult to comprehend in most industries. Capacity is forecast to more than double between 2024 and 2028 – from around 12.2GW to over 26GW. In 2023 alone, data centres across the region consumed an estimated 105 – 180TWh of energy. And the pipeline keeps growing.
Behind those numbers are real projects: hyperscale campuses in Singapore and Malaysia, co-location expansions in Japan and South Korea, and a wave of new development in Taiwan driven by the island’s position at the intersection of semiconductor manufacturing, offshore wind build-out and genuine government ambition on clean energy.
The energy question is inseparable from the infrastructure question. Developers aren’t selecting sites on connectivity alone any more. Grid access, the availability of renewable energy under long-term contracts, and confidence in energy procurement strategy are now as decisive as any technical factor. Taiwan is a useful case study here. Supportive offshore wind and solar policies have created a genuine alignment between national climate goals and data centre development strategy that operators elsewhere are watching closely.
Where the data centre talent pressure is being felt
The skills required to deliver this next phase of APAC data centre development are not the same skills that delivered the last one. The sector’s move from passive grid consumer to active energy participant has created demand for a specific and genuinely scarce set of capabilities.
Energy procurement specialists who understand corporate PPAs, can navigate the varied regulatory environments within APAC, and can structure long-term renewable offtake agreements, are in short supply across the region.
Grid and high-voltage electrical engineers – the people who can actually secure and manage the connections that large-scale data centres require – are sought-after by renewables developers, utilities and digital infrastructure players simultaneously. Project developers who can manage complex, multi-jurisdiction permitting in markets like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea bring hard-won project knowledge that cannot be quickly trained or easily replaced. And as sustainability reporting moves from voluntary to mandatory across much of the region, ESG and decarbonisation specialists have gone from a nice-to-have to a business-critical hire.
What makes this particularly challenging is that these skills don’t sit neatly within traditional data centre recruitment. They come from the renewables industry, from offshore wind, from solar and storage, from grid infrastructure. And finding them requires networks and relationships built over years in those markets, not weeks.
Data centre talent that moves across borders
One of the clearest signals of how tight the market has become is the degree to which talent is moving across borders to fill the gap. Japanese engineers are actively supporting grid projects in Taiwan. European specialists, particularly those with offshore wind and power procurement backgrounds, are being engaged to advise on energy strategy across APAC. Skilled professionals from Australia and South Korea are moving into markets where project pipelines are accelerating faster than local talent supply can keep pace with.
This cross-border mobility isn’t a workaround. For many projects, it’s the only viable path to getting the right people in place at the right time. But it requires the ability to move people across jurisdictions compliantly, efficiently and with genuine understanding of the immigration, tax and employment frameworks involved.
How TH supports data centre developers across APAC
Taylor Hopkinson has been placing specialists in the renewables industry since 2009. We came to data centre work through the energy side – through our relationships with offshore wind developers, solar IPPs and grid infrastructure businesses. That origin matters. It means the networks we draw on for data centre talent searches are built into the renewables industry itself, where many of these specialists actually work.
Our APAC presence is grounded in in-country teams rather than regional generalism. Agnes leads our permanent recruitment in Taipei. We have dedicated teams in Seoul and Tokyo. That local depth means we understand the hiring landscape in each market: the salary expectations, the regulatory context, the competitive dynamics, rather than applying a single regional template across very different environments.
The cross-border capability is supported by our colleagues at Brunel, whose global mobility infrastructure enables us to manage international placements with the compliance rigour that complex, multi-jurisdiction projects require. For clients moving talent between markets, which is increasingly the norm, this is not a peripheral capability. It’s central to whether a hire actually lands.
Our work in this sector spans permanent recruitment for strategic and technical roles, contracting and project support for EPC activity and construction phases, and talent mapping and market intelligence for clients who need to understand the hiring landscape before they can build a workforce plan. We work with data centre operators, hyperscalers, renewable developers, infrastructure funds and the investment platforms that are increasingly positioning at the intersection of clean power and digital infrastructure.
What the next few years require
The projects being planned and sanctioned across APAC right now will require a sustained flow of specialist talent over multiple years, not a single hiring sprint. The organisations best positioned to deliver them will be those that treat workforce planning as a strategic function, building relationships with the talent market in parallel with the development of their project pipelines.
The intersection of renewables and digital infrastructure is still relatively new as a defined specialism, and the talent pool is still forming. The firms that build the right networks and the right hiring capability now will find it significantly easier to staff the next phase of growth than those who come to the market late.
Agnes and the wider TH team are working with clients across this space every day. If you are developing or powering data centres in APAC and want to understand what the talent market looks like for the roles you need to fill, let’s talk.
