Nachrichten und Einblicke
Datacloud 2026: Building the Workforce Behind Europe’s Digital Infrastructure
The Mercury team returned to Cannes this month for Datacloud Global Congress 2026, one of the most influential events in the digital infrastructure calendar. This year’s event welcomed almost 7,000 attendees, a 75 per cent increase on the previous year, reflecting the rapid growth of the sector and the scale of investment being made across Europe.
As discussions around AI, power availability and delivery capacity continue to shape the industry, another challenge featured prominently throughout the event: how organisations build the workforce needed to support long-term growth amid increasing labour market pressures.
Mercury joined clients, partners and industry leaders to discuss this topic, with Chief People Officer Joanne Cluxton participating in a panel focused on building a long-term pipeline to create a resilient workforce.
Your Vision Our Duty: Strengthening Our Employee Value Proposition
As Europe’s leading data centre construction provider, Mercury continues to grow its delivery capability across the continent. In 2025, the company achieved €2 billion in revenue while delivering projects for some of the world’s leading corporations. At any given time, Mercury has approximately 30 live projects across 16 countries.
As the industry continues to navigate labour shortages, Mercury remains focused on attracting, developing and retaining the talent needed to support its growth across Europe. Speaking at Datacloud, Joanne Cluxton highlighted the importance of investing in people and creating clear opportunities for growth:
Mercury’s purpose is people focused: Your Vision, Our Duty applies to our people as much as our clients. We’re investing in our employee value proposition – creating career development opportunities, a strong working environment, and meaningful rewards and recognition, so our people can realise their own vision of themselves.
That commitment can be seen across Mercury’s approach to learning, development and career progression. In 2025, Mercury welcomed more than 400 new colleagues and achieved over 200 internal promotions, with a target of reaching 1,000 promotions by 2030.
We continue to invest heavily in developing talent from within. More than 200,000 learning and development hours were delivered during the year, while graduate and apprenticeship programmes are consistently expanding, with graduate intake expected to double from 45 in 2025 to approximately 100 in 2026, alongside the recruitment of 100 apprentices.
As we continue to grow across Europe, culture remains a critical part of our five-year strategy, Go Beyond. Through 40 culture sessions taking place across 10 countries, Mercury is engaging directly with employees to understand how its purpose, values and behaviours are experienced day to day, helping shape the next stage of our growth and embedding a culture-as-standard approach across the organisation.
Building the Multidisciplinary Skillset for Modern Data Centre Delivery
During the panel discussion, Joanne spoke about the importance of building multidisciplinary teams to meet the evolving demands of the data centre industry. Today’s projects require expertise from across engineering, commissioning, planning, safety, sustainability and off-site manufacturing, with teams working more closely together than ever before.
At Mercury, we know the importance of developing and nurturing an adventurer mindset – building teams that are comfortable stepping into new challenges, working beyond traditional roles and adapting as the industry continues to change. As data centre delivery evolves, there is growing value in people who can see the bigger picture and contribute across different stages of a project.
The discussion also explored the challenge of building specialised teams in remote locations. In these markets, success depends on combining local knowledge with international expertise. Mercury has seen this first-hand in the Nordics, where teams have been successfully scaled by bringing together experienced Mercury people from across Europe with local talent, regional supply chain partners and long-term investment in the region.
Investing in the future of our workforce as we scale across Europe
Attracting and retaining talent remains a strategic priority for Mercury as we continue to grow at scale.
Joanne emphasised the importance of giving both current and future employees a clear understanding of what Mercury can offer over the long term. Through our Employee Value Proposition, we focus on career development opportunities, culture, rewards and recognition, working environment, and helping our people understand where they can build their future within the business.
This year, Mercury opened its new world-class design and engineering headquarters in Dublin, bringing together more than 400 professionals from across Design, Engineering, Specialist Services and Support teams under one roof. The headquarters sits alongside Mercury’s state-of-the-art Off-Site Manufacturing facility in Schönebeck and a growing network of regional offices in key locations including Frankfurt, Paris and Zurich. Together, these investments support collaboration, knowledge sharing and career development while strengthening Mercury’s ability to deliver for clients across Europe.
We are growing and growing our people with us. This long-term investment provides the infrastructure to scale, strengthening innovation, collaboration, career development and ultimately Mercury’s ability to deliver for our clients, wherever they are.
A Strategic Partner in Building Europe’s Digital Future
The conversations at Datacloud 2026 reinforced a clear message: the future of digital infrastructure will depend on organisations’ ability to attract, develop and retain talented people. As demand continues to grow, organisations that invest in talent, development and culture will be best positioned to build the resilient workforces needed to support Europe’s digital future. For Mercury, that means continuing to back our people to realise their vision of themselves.
Datacloud 2026 provided a valuable forum for clients, partners and industry leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping the sector. We look forward to next year’s event and remain committed to advancing the data centre sector.
