Dive Brief:
- L5 Mission Critical, a data center services company launched Sept. 16 by construction company Walbridge to provide data center services, has hired Matt Landek as president and CEO, the company announced Wednesday.
- Landek served as global president of data centers and critical environments at JLL Work Dynamics, where he led a global workforce of 2,500 employees across 340 data centers. Detroit-based Walbridge is one of the country’s largest privately held construction companies with more than 1,500 employees in North America.
- With Walbridge, L5 Mission Critical will provide operational services for data center clients in enterprise facilities as well as gigawatt-scale campuses, Landek said in a statement. “As more service providers continue to consolidate, our ability to provide a flexible, transparent, community-based approach to operational delivery will pay dividends to the clients and the communities we serve,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Data center capacity in the U.S. is expected to double within the next three years, with nearly 45GW of additional capacity planned due to AI and cloud growth, according to Data Center Frontier. Currently, capacity is extremely limited, with most tenants securing space in small, fragmented blocks and contracting for 2028 deliveries, according to JLL’s 2026 North America Data Center Midyear report.
The challenge to procure and deliver new data center capacity is disrupting development pipelines and increasing reliance on existing, stabilized data centers, which already have contractually reserved capacity, largely protecting them from grid constraints and new interconnection moratoriums, Morningstar said in commentary released Aug. 5.
While many data centers may not be able to support liquid cooling that is required to support AI GPU storage compute, they can be upgraded or retrofitted to support this new demand, says Sean Farney, vice president of data center strategy at JLL.
L5 Mission Critical is targeting third-party data center clients by offering an integrated solution, with Walbridge providing construction and L5 providing operational assistance to clients looking for help transitioning from construction to facilities management, the company said in a news release.
“L5 will differentiate itself by owning the handoff from construction and commissioning into live operations — the gap where most new data centers struggle through their first 12 months, and one no other provider has an incentive to close because each touches only a single link in the chain,” Landek told Facilities Dive in an email. “We're pairing that ownership with 1) an operating model built for hyperscale from the start rather than retrofitted from legacy practice, 2) a century of Walbridge experience running complex mega-facilities, and 3) a workforce and community program that goes beyond what service providers typically offer.”
“As demand skyrockets, our clients not only need to get their projects up and out of the ground fast — they need critical operations and value-add services that reduce risk, ensure uptime and educate communities,” said John Rakolta III, president and chief administrative officer of Walbridge.
At JLL, Landek led the company’s expansion into the data center market through acquisitions, internal initiatives and operations. He was involved in the firm’s acquisition of data center technical and project management services company SKAE Power Solutions in 2024, which was combined with other JLL operations to form a new technical services division under Landek.
In November, JLL struck an agreement with prefabricated AI data center solutions specialist InfraPartners to help it fast-track AI data center development and operations to provide an end-to-end delivery model to hyperscalers, colocation providers and enterprise clients.
Before leading the company’s data center operations, Landek led account teams at JLL across contracted services, including facilities management, engineering, employee experience, white space services, sourcing and procurement and project management. Prior to joining JLL in 2012, Landek worked as a facilities management professional for the Cook County government, spanning parts of Chicago and its suburbs.
“Matt’s expertise will allow us to scale our data center construction practice to a full build-to-operate model that our clients need in this complicated time,” said Rakolta.
To address workforce capacity constraints impacting the industry, L5 Mission Critical is also developing a data center workforce training curriculum that it says will create clear, accelerated pathways for skilled tradespeople, per the release.
“High-density power and AI inference workload management require a different operator skill set than most FM professionals were trained for,” Landek said. “The handover from construction to the operating team is exposing new problem sets for operations teams not equipped for the demands and pressure of these operations. The market has not caught up on credentialing, training, or career pathways for these environments which is driving up demand for those experienced technicians.”
Organizations that develop targeted, hands-on training programs and provide greater lead time in onboarding will be successful, he said.
