Canadian Data Center Workforce Sees Record Expansion
The number of people employed at data centres in Canada has soared in the past year – an outlying trend in a labour market that has been mostly sluggish due to the uncertainty of the trade war and employers shelving hiring plans.
A new report from the job-search site Indeed.com, which relied on Statistics Canada payroll data, found that data centre employment between June, 2025, and June, 2026, increased by 23 per cent, or about 8,000 jobs. By contrast, the number of salaried employees in all other sectors in that same time period grew by just 0.8 per cent.
Statscan does not collect specific data on data centre jobs, but the agency tracks total employment of people working in computing infrastructure, data processing and web hosting. This is the dataset researchers from Indeed relied upon. Employment in that job classification rose from approximately 34,450 jobs to 42,300 jobs between last June and this June. The report suggests that much of this job growth can be attributed to increased employment at AI data centres.
Online postings for data centre-related jobs on Indeed.com also illustrate the employment trend captured in the Statscan data. According to Indeed’s report, released Wednesday, job postings for data centres rose by 68 per cent in the past year, with particularly sharp growth in August.
Compared with the United States, Canada has been late to the artificial intelligence boom in terms of business investment in the technology and equipment powering AI data centres, and the construction of new data centres.
But in the past six months, tens of billions of dollars from both the public and private sectors have been committed to AI data centres and computing infrastructure. According to data from Aterio, a Vancouver-based company that tracks data centre construction, roughly 200 new data centre projects have been announced across the country in the past three years and 15 are already under construction.
Data centre workers, who range from managers, engineers and IT professionals, to maintenance and site operations staff, are still a minute part of the overall Canadian labour market, representing less than one per cent of the total employed workforce, according to the report.
The report also showed that data centre roles are still niche, with only about six in every 1,000 Canadian job postings mentioning any data centre keywords. The largest number of data centre postings were hiring for management roles with “cloud consultant” ranked as one of the most common job titles. About one in 10 Canadian data centre postings this year has been for installation and maintenance roles.
Governments and private companies have touted job creation as an economic benefit of data centres, even as public opposition has led some municipalities to temporarily ban the construction of these facilities. Legislation that Ontario introduced last year that aimed to set parameters on how AI data centres consume electricity, also explicitly mentioned job creation as a condition for large projects being greenlit by the province.
However, AI data centres do not create many jobs once they are fully operational: A large hyperscale AI facility can employ between 50 and 150 people, whereas its build out might need more than 1,000 people in construction and the skilled trades.
For those who do end up permanently employed at a data centre, Indeed’s report suggests that data centre positions pay more. A data centre-specific sales role pays 43 per cent more than sales jobs on average, the report said, while management roles have a 28-per-cent pay premium, and IT infrastructure operations and support workers earn 25 per cent more per year at data centres.
Moreover, more Canadian workers are interested in data centre roles, according to Indeed’s data. Between January, 2022, and August, 2026, the share of total daily searches on Indeed in Canada containing data centre keywords tripled. The report suggests that job seekers appear to be responding to the roles’ pay premiums.
With reports from Jason Kirby and Joe Castaldo
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
