Siemens plans 350 jobs in two booming Wake County towns to supply data centers
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- Siemens plans to create 350 jobs across Knightdale and Wendell by 2028.
- Company will open two new facilities and expand an existing Wendell site.
- Projects aim to supply power systems for U.S. data centers amid AI demand.
German industrial manufacturing giant Siemens has committed to create 350 jobs in eastern Wake County over the next few years to equip proliferating U.S. data centers.
On Tuesday, Siemens said it will open two local facilities — and grow its existing site — across a pair of fast-growing towns east of Raleigh. The company plans to add 100 positions at a new power devices facility in Knightdale by the end of 2026 and open a device protection and automation site in Wendell.
For its third expansion project, Siemens promised to create 200 additional jobs at its long-running Wendell campus by 2028.
Siemens is currently among the world’s 100 most-valuable publicly traded companies. It specializes in automation, electrical, and transportation technologies and is not to be confused with Siemens Energy, an independent spinoff business that has also recently pledged to hire hundreds in North Carolina.
In the Tar Heel State, Siemens expects to make power systems for data centers nationwide. “Customer demand is at an all-time high as advanced infrastructure upgrades are needed to meet the power requirements from increasing AI workloads,” Siemens U.S. president of smart infrastructure Ruth Gratzke said in a company statement Tuesday.
The company says its systems can help developers launch data centers faster, with Siemens CEO Roland Busch telling investors on an earnings call last month that he expects current project deployment times to be cut in half.
Siemens’ footprint in Wendell dates back to 1980 when it opened an office in what at the time was a town with fewer than 2,300 residents. Like many Raleigh bedroom communities (Knightdale included), Wendell has experienced tremendous growth in recent decades, with its planning department estimating its current population at above 22,000.
“A lot of people that I know that have been lifelong Wendell residents have worked (at Siemens),” Virginia Gray, the town’s mayor, said in a phone interview. “They’ve been a wonderful community partner.”
Besides its North Carolina sites, Siemens on Tuesday also announced plans to open a lighting panel facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina as part of the company’s $165 million investment pledge across the Carolinas.
Several thousand U.S. data centers are currently built or planned, with notable North Carolina sites confirmed by Amazon in Richmond County and Microsoft in Person County. In many communities, however, residents have opposed potential hyperscale facilities that house rows of servers without employing many full-time workers directly.
On the other side of Wake County, the town of Apex last week became the latest North Carolina municipality to set a 12-month moratorium on new data center projects. This decision came days after a Maryland developer scrapped data center plans amid community pushback.
This story was originally published March 17, 2026 at 9:00 AM.
