Will bigtechs turn into infrastructuralists? AI boom pushes them to hire energy workers

Big Tech is experiencing a boom in hiring energy professionals, CNBC reports. According to staffing platform Workforce.ai, energy-related job openings grew 34% year-over-year in 2024. In 2025, the pace of hiring in this field remained strong and was 30% higher than before the introduction of AI in 2022. The trend marks a dramatic change in the bigtechs' core businesses, CNBC points out, noting that some tech companies "may transform into infrastructure companies" as a result.

Energy is becoming a critical resource for technology companies as their AI strategies are directly dependent on uninterrupted power supply to data centers, CNBC notes. Data centers will consume about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024, up 12% from five years ago, according to data from the International Energy Agency. As infrastructure builds up, demand is only expected to increase.

Meeting this demand has become one of the key challenges for technology giants. In response, companies are building up internal expertise in the energy sector, investing in their own power sources and, in some cases, taking over entire companies.

This trend reflects a marked shift from the previous phase, when demand for sustainability specialists was growing strongly on the back of the Inflation Reduction Act (a law aimed at reducing inflation), CNBC notes. Then interest in such roles waned amid companies' shift away from formal "green" management, especially after the start of Donald Trump's second presidential term in the US. Now, according to recruiters interviewed by CNBC, the priority is now on operational positions - energy procurement, working with energy markets, interacting with power grids and developing energy strategy.

Microsoft is considered the unnamed winner in the battle for energy talent: since 2022, the company has hired more than 570 professionals in the field, CNBC specifies. Among them is Betsy Beck, who took over as Microsoft's director of energy markets in January 2025, moving from Google. In 2024, Microsoft also poached former General Electric CFO Caroline Diebeck Happe to the position of chief operating officer, which may indicate the company's long-term strategic direction.

Microsoft is second only to Amazon in energy hiring - the company has 605 such employees, including workers at Amazon's subsidiary Amazon Web Services.

Google, which has long been catching up with rivals in the AI field, is now starting to reap the rewards: shares in parent company Alphabet have risen sharply, and its market capitalization last week surpassed that of Apple for the first time since 2019. Google's energy strategy has also caught the market's attention: the company has hired about 340 energy professionals since 2022. In January, it was joined by Eric Schubert, an energy regulatory consultant who previously spent nearly 14 years at BP. Last November, Google brought on Duke University researcher Tyler Norris as head of innovation in energy markets and continues to expand its energy policy and markets team, CNBC summarizes .

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor