Walbridge’s L5 Mission Critical Hires JLL Data Center Leader as CEO

Matt Landek, former global president of data centers and critical environments at JLL Work Dynamics, is now president and CEO of L5 Mission Critical, the data center services firm that construction company Walbridge launched on Sept. 16.

At JLL, Landek led a global workforce of 2,500 employees across 340 data centers. Detroit-based Walbridge, one of the largest privately held construction companies in the United States, employs more than 1,500 people in North America.

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.

The new venture enters a market under acute supply pressure. U.S. data center capacity 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. Capacity remains extremely limited: most tenants are securing space in small, fragmented blocks and contracting for 2028 deliveries, according to JLL's 2026 North America Data Center Midyear report.

Morningstar, in commentary released Aug. 5, said the challenge of procuring and delivering new capacity is disrupting development pipelines and increasing reliance on existing, stabilized data centers — facilities whose contractually reserved capacity largely protects them from grid constraints and new interconnection moratoriums.

Sean Farney, vice president of data center strategy at JLL, notes that while many existing data centers cannot support the liquid cooling required for AI GPU compute, they can be upgraded or retrofitted to serve that demand.

L5's pitch targets third-party data center clients with an integrated offering: Walbridge handles construction, and L5 handles operations for clients navigating the transition from construction to facilities management.

"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 said. "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.

Landek built his data center credentials at JLL over more than a decade. He led the firm's expansion into the data center market through acquisitions, internal initiatives and operations, including the 2024 acquisition of SKAE Power Solutions, a data center technical and project management services company that JLL combined with other operations into a new technical services division under Landek's leadership. In November, JLL struck an agreement with InfraPartners, a prefabricated AI data center solutions specialist, to fast-track AI data center development and operations for hyperscalers, colocation providers and enterprise clients.

Before taking over data center operations, Landek led JLL account teams across contracted services including facilities management, engineering, employee experience, white space services, sourcing and procurement and project management. He joined JLL in 2012 after working 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," Rakolta said.

L5 is also building a data center workforce training curriculum that it says will create clear, accelerated pathways for skilled tradespeople, according to the release. Landek frames the training gap as structural rather than incidental.

"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.