Piketon, Ohio is about to face a data center hiring problem unlike anything the state has seen. SB Energy is building, owning, and operating the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus on the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in Pike County, under a 20-year lease to OpenAI covering approximately 8 gigawatts of IT capacity. Nvidia is the exclusive AI compute infrastructure provider and has committed up to $105 billion in financing to back the project. The numbers are real, the land is controlled, and the permitting clock is running. The talent this campus needs is not sitting idle in southern Ohio.

For commissioning engineers, look for documented Cx authority credentials (CxA or BCxA), hands-on work with medium-voltage switchgear, generator paralleling, and BMS/EPMS integration. For critical facilities roles, CDCP, CDCS, or equivalent Uptime Institute credentials signal real data center experience rather than generic facilities work. Any candidate coming from federal or DOE-adjacent industrial sites who also holds electrical or mechanical licenses is unusually well-positioned for PORTS-Pike given the regulated environment. OSHA 30 is table stakes for anyone walking a construction site at this scale.

For commissioning engineers, expect to pay relocation or a project per diem. These candidates travel nationally and will compare your offer against other hyperscale projects in Virginia, Texas, and Arizona. A per diem structure of $150 to $225 per day plus travel is common on large commissioning packages. For operations hires, relocation assistance in the $5,000 to $10,000 range is often what closes a candidate who is otherwise interested but anchored to Columbus or Cincinnati. Entry-level technician roles can be filled locally with a training commitment, but mid-level and senior operators need a compelling total package. Contract-to-permanent is a workable structure for commissioning and early operations roles; it gives the candidate a look at the site and gives you a conversion option when the building stabilizes.

Commissioning engineers come from national networks, period. The pool is roughly 2,000 to 3,500 people in the US who have actually closed out a hyperscale data center. They move between projects and know each other. Cold outreach to people currently on active hyperscale sites in other states is the primary sourcing motion. Critical facilities engineers are concentrated in Northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, and the Midwest data center corridors around Columbus and Chicago. Facilities technicians for an Ohio site can realistically be sourced regionally, with Columbus and Cincinnati as the primary draw areas. Construction trades come from IBEW locals, UA pipefitters, and ironworker locals in southern and central Ohio, with overflow from the broader Ohio Valley.

Pike County and surrounding southern Ohio have produced decades of workers who operated and maintained a massive federal nuclear facility governed by DOE security protocols, heavy regulatory oversight, and zero-tolerance maintenance standards. That culture maps directly onto critical data center operations. Workers from that legacy and contractors already familiar with the site's physical and regulatory history represent a genuine head start on the industrial and facilities side of staffing. The union building trades in this region are also capable and experienced with utility-scale power and pipeline work, which matters enormously given the 9.2 GW of on-site generation that has to be built alongside the data center shells.

The thin side is straightforward: there is no existing data center operations talent cluster in Pike County. The nearest concentrations of experienced critical facilities operators are in Columbus, and Columbus has its own large-project pipeline competing for those same people. Anyone sourcing operations roles here needs to treat this as a national search from day one, not a local one.

Federal environmental review is projected to complete by December 23, 2026, and as of mid-2026 key permitting steps including the Ohio Power Siting Board transmission case for the planned 765-kV line are still pending. That means construction mobilization is most likely a 2027 event, with commissioning engineering demand following 18 to 24 months later depending on which building phases move first. Operations hiring for initial phases would come after that. Staffing firms should be building candidate pipelines for commissioning and operations now, well before the req officially opens, because those candidates have long lead times and competitive offers from multiple projects at any given moment.

NextDCX recruits for your toughest data center roles. Share the work, location, and experience your team needs. We run a fresh search for every role, approach people directly, and speak with every candidate before introducing them. You get people screened for the work, pay, location, and availability, ready to meet your hiring team. We also support recruiting partners. If PORTS-Pike is on your board, send us the roles and we start now.

For the buildout, see SB Energy's PORTS-Pike Technology Campus project. Comp sources: ZipRecruiter and dcgeeks 2026 salary data.