Eman Sumair does not share the angst afflicting many of her contemporaries over artificial intelligence’s potential to devalue graduate skills.
The 19-year-old from Slough, a UK town housing Europe’s largest data centre cluster, is in the final part of a three-year apprenticeship at Equinix, which runs hundreds of the facilities worldwide. Her course of on-the-job training, plus one day a week at college, incurs no university debt and will give her a vocational qualification and experience as a critical facilities engineer — a key role in the infrastructure build-out underpinning the AI boom.
“It’s better than university,” she says. “I know I’m in this industry . . . Data centres are going nowhere. They’re your phone, banks, Fortnite.” Their significance, she adds, is under-appreciated, visible to consumers only when a digital service goes down.