Nanticoke, Luzerne County, PA -
In June, Amazon Web Services announced it would invest $20 billion in Pennsylvania, creating 1,250 data center jobs, but thousands more jobs for people who build the centers and the infrastructure serving them. AWS plans large centers in Luzerne County near the nuclear plant in Salem Twp. and in Bucks County. Closer to Hazleton, Amazon has also expressed interest in opening data centers in Kline and Banks townships.
Data centers are built in clusters, not individually.
LCCC President John Yudichak said the college is responding by setting up a Career and Technology Academy. Helped by a $1 million state education grant, the academy offers college credits to students at Hazleton Area Career Center and other career and technical schools before they graduate from high school.
The college also offers pre-apprenticeship programs and microcredentials for students or workers who want to branch out to new jobs.
Thinking about the forecast need by 2030 for 300,000 skilled people to work in trades like electrical, HVAC and plumbing, Yudichak said those are hands-on jobs.
“To get to cloud computing, we have to build the cloud,” he said.
Where Pennsylvania has seen other booms, like in natural gas, which Yudichak said is a finite resource, he sees data centers as longer lasting. “They’re upgrading the equipment all the time.”
As Yudichak walked out of the education center to see some of those jobs demonstrated inside trailers in the parking lot, he glanced to the far hillside where construction was underway. Amazon is building a last-mile distribution center. “The little blue trucks,” he said.
Inside one trailer, where Figgins demonstrated how to splice fiber optic cables, his colleague, David Harpham, said splicing is a skill needed outdoors, where cables are strung, and inside data center buildings, where connections are made for the computer equipment.
Harpham and Figgins work for Team Fishel, a subcontractor for Amazon, and travel with the data centers to help train workers.
Figgins, previously a foreman on undeground electrial wiring projects, said he had never flown in an airliner until he switched to fiber optics 10 years ago. His co-worker Mark Glazener happened into a career in fiber optics after registering for a two-day workshop.
After watching the splicers at work, Harpham asked educators in the trailer to consider how meticulous a student would have to be to fit into the job. Companies offer final training on their equipment and cables, but Harpham, who is Fishel’s national HR manager, looks for workers with soft skills like teamwork and patience.
Inside another trailer, Nazrawi Yenberberu stood next to a rack of computers like those that fill data centers and a control panel for power from the main electric source and backup generators.
Data centers have to run all the time. When they don’t, the outages make national news, as the disruption in the Verizon network did on the afternoon of the workshop, so the centers also have battery backups. That keeps power flowing for the minute or two that pass before generators kick in, Yenberberu said. He is a chief engineer at AWS and an instructor at Northern Virginia Community College, which started the nation’s first degree program in data center operations, a program that LCCC is preparing to emulate.
Yenberberu said some racks now come with their own cooling systems.
Matthew Harper, an AWS data center engineering operations manager who previously served in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, said the company looks for ways to provide cooling with less impact to the community and at less cost.
John Augustine III, director of Penn’s Northeast, said there will be enough work on data centers to generate good-paying jobs for at least 15 years, but he said corporations like AWS could do a better job of telling the story about efforts to make the centers more efficient.
At public meetings about data centers in the Hazleton area, speakers have expressed concerns about rising electricity rates, water use, noise, and climate change — topics that people also raised with AWS workers during the workshop.
William Colsher, a data center manager for AWS in Northern Virginia, said Amazon installed quieter fans at a center nearer residences than at his center in an industrial park. Centers now use evaporative cooling water, which is more efficient than closed-loop chillers, and run on the hottest summer days. Other days, centers operate by rejecting enough heat at a constant rate “to keep the computers happy.”
The business model is “pay as you go cloud computing,” and the goal is to put “every electron we buy to the service,” Colsher said.
His team includes a single mom who used to work in logistics and two community college graduates who started as interns. About 25 to 40 operations technicians repair components, and a computer repair team works on racks 25 to 30. Contractors replace filters, filter media, and repair temperature sensors. Workers staff remote monitoring centers in shifts around the clock.
Colsher, also a veteran of the nuclear navy, started working for Amazon through a temp agency after his discharge, got hired full-time and within four years was running a $1 billion center.
Photo: Principal of Workforce and Economic Development at Amazon Web Services, Nicholas Lee-Romagnolo, speaks about job opportunities surrounding data centers at Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke, Wednesday, January 14, 2026. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER, Standard Speaker Newspaper)
