Mobilising today's talent to
industry of tomorrow
The go-to specialised technical recruiter of mobile scarce talent for international new-industry construction projects.
"Skills and labour are the real key to transitioning to a greener economy and lowering carbon emissions"
– Ignacio Galán, Executive Chairman of Iberdrola
SilverBack enables this new-industry transition by recruiting, training and empowering the skills required, mobilising them to where they deliver the biggest impact.
Projects
in 12 years
hours
on new-industry projects
employees
with 20+ nationalities
of hours
worked on clean-tech projects
Why SilverBack
Global capability
With an international focus and workforce, SilverBack is increasing its geographic footprint year on year.
Industry expertise
12+ years experience in recruiting and mobilising talent to complex, hi-tech construction projects. We understand the challenges of talent scarcity, mobilising at scale and operational deadlines.
Fully-managed service
SilverBack self-manages all aspects of recruitment, mobilisation, logistics and compliance to streamline our client and candidate experience.
Our stories
Our people
Our culture is ambitious, but not at all costs. We believe our people will perform best in a working environment which is intentional, respectful, empathetic and progressive.
Our thoughts
September felt like the wrong kind of time travelling. Only backwards. For those of a certain age, the bankruptcy of Tupperware the food storage icon, the lethal mass-destruction of Hezbollah’s paging devices in Lebanon and a US President escaping two assassination attempts for the first time since the 1970’s were flashbacks to very troubled Cold War decades, political volatility and inflationary times. Hmmm…on second thoughts…..maybe not much has changed. And yet, the professional analysts of those challenging times never saw the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, a mobile digital revolution and forty years of lower interest rates coming. Lesson learned on pessimism hiding progress? Let’s fast forward to today. Perhaps, the bigger existential threat (vs nuclear war) for our planet is climate change and an urgent battle to electrify and decarbonise the global economy. But, the headlines on that battle have darkened too, and not just with catastrophic flooding in Europe and similar destruction in the US post-Hurricane Helene. The decarbonising poster child of the global economy has been the automobile transition away from internal combustion engines (ICE) to battery-powered electric vehicles(EVs). Transition progress up to last year had confounded the commentariat, as sales penetration rates for EVs kept beating forecasts and rocketed from 2% of total sales in 2018 to 18% just 5 years later. Research data from Bloomberg forecast a 33% rate of penetration by 2027 but the media have switched tone. Now, the wording is all about slowing, cooling, delaying, abandoning or even failing. Check out these headlines of recent months: Europe Battery Factory Plans Are In A Shambles – Cleantechnica Ford Shrinks Its EV Rollout Plans As Demand Lags – Wall Street Journal EV Slowdown Steers World Further Off Course From Net Zero – Bloomberg Toyota Cuts 2026 Global EV Output By A Third – Reuters Tesla Sales Fall For second Straight Quarter – The Guardian BMW Cancels $2 billion battery cells contract with Northvolt – Reuters The final headline was a precursor to much bigger headlines for Northvolt in recent weeks. Having raised $15 billion of financing, Sweden’s Northvolt is possibly Europe’s highest profile project with a mission to be an all-in-one shop offering everything from material production and battery making to end-of-life recycling. Those full-cycle ambitions are now ‘on hold’ as the company seeks to put the enterprise on a more secure financial footing. The Guardian summarised the remedial actions as follows: “The Swedish batterymaker Northvolt is to cut 1,600 jobs, in response to “headwinds” blowing through the electric car industry. The battery company announced redundancies across three of its sites on Monday, including 1,000 in Skellefteå, in northern Sweden, where it is suspending the expansion of Northvolt Ett, Europe’s first homegrown battery gigafactory. The company, which has been seen as Europe’s most promising contender to China’s producers, will also cut 400 jobs in Västerås, in central Sweden, where Northvolt Labs is based, and 200 in Stockholm, home to its head office. Peter Carlsson, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, insisted that “overall momentum for electrification remains strong” but that “tough” decisions were needed to ensure the company’s future” There is no sugar-coating that messaging. However, we should remind ourselves that EV battery manufacture has huge technological hurdles and is subject to customer demand and supply chain risk, while trying to keep pace with phenomenal adoption growth rates and a global supply chain land grab. In a more mature sector, battery production would be a classical cyclical manufacturing activity. Now, consider the pace of technology change and the global shift in consumer behaviours. Anyone reminded of the semiconductor chip manufacturing sector? Think back to the 2000s and the huge highly risky investment in fab factories required while the global economy hurtled into the digital age. For years the financial market orthodoxy was that semiconductor chip sector stocks like AMD, Intel, Micron, Samsung, TSMC, ASML, Broadcom or Nvidia should NEVER be owned by investors, only traded. Tell that today to Jensen Huang and his colleagues at the 3 trillion dollar Nvidia chip superstar which is now described as more important to the world economy than the US Federal Reserve. Hyperbole certainly, but this elevation illustrates the emotional rollercoaster the media try to create for an audience gasping at yet another manufacturing rockstar following in Apple’s and Tesla’s footsteps. So too should we be conscious of emotions, and media neediness in the coverage of EV’s cyclical misses and growth bumps. Those nascent bumps and bruises should always be considered in the context of a structural super-cycle for EVs and batteries with a 2050 Net Zero end-game. More specifically, readers should think about how numbers and percentages can tell a story, or not. Also, we should know that the ICE to EV transition is two stories, not one. Try these numbers for size and perspective…. *EV sales are still growing, just not at year-on-year doubling rates (20% vs 100%). *Slowing growth rates on much larger sales bases are still very big numbers. 12 million zero emission vehicles likely to be sold globally in 2024. *The media headlines will say Norway’s EV sales only grew 5% in August. But, you probably won’t read that EVs had 94% market share in Norway last month! *Electric cars and trucks make up 60% of all new vehicle sales in China. *BMW has just passed out Tesla on EV sales in Europe. Tesla sales in Europe are actually off 16% but you probably won’t read that on Twitter/X….as chaotic leadership starts to hurt brand. *Now the story that nobody reads. Global fossil-fuel ICE vehicle sales are DOWN by 25% since 2017, and the global ICE vehicle fleet is set to peak in 2025. *Oh, and 97% of Chinese consumers say their next vehicle will be all-electric. The cyclical aspect of manufacturing is often missed when there is a massive structural shift happening across decades. Every time one reads a new sales or growth figure for EVs, one should be checking the ICE figure too. The shift is massive and happening at a rapid pace. However, bear in mind the semiconductor industry analogy. Customers can disappoint, technologies and innovations can go wrong, manufacturing infrastructure can be delayed and interest rates/money can get tight. That’s the manufacturing business which Northvolt is seeking to revolutionise. But buckle up, EVs are the future and are still our planet’s best bet to ensure time for travel…
Germany can confuse. Consider its meticulous economic planning and then shudder at its disastrous pre-Ukraine war energy strategy. Similarly, a reputation for strict regulation jars with a history of accident-prone banks and recent memories of a breath-taking Wirecard fraud. Even today, financial commentators are scratching their heads at headline economic stagnation (measured by GDP) contrasting sharply with all-time-high levels for the nation’s key stock market index, the Dax. In fact, investor enthusiasm could almost be described as giddy. Check out a 4% gain for the Dax in the past week and a Europe-leading 12% increase year-to-date, and that adds up to a better-than-tech sector performance. And yet, the combined value of Germany’s top 40 Dax constituent companies is less than the market capitalisation of just one AI and cloud computing superstar stock, Nvidia. It really is remarkable that one company’s future in the cloud(AI) could be worth more than the destiny of all of Germany’s biggest companies. However, the cloud is going to be a very big part of Germany’s future too…. May is the month of the Data Centre World conference in Frankfurt and the choice of venue is highly appropriate. Frankfurt is the 6 th biggest data centre market in the world and therefore is a critical part of Europe’s cloud/AI infrastructure story. Indeed, we have previously written about how the rapid acceleration of data centre construction should be viewed as the best indicator of the size of investment piling into AI and the cloud computing required to power this technology: “….the bigger story according to Schroders’ analysts was “hiding in plain sight ”. Nvidia in their call with Wall Street’s analysts explained the uplift to their projections by mentioning ‘data centres’ no less than 56 times. Clearly, the destination for these advanced GPU chips needed to be premium performance, secure and stable data centre environments. The cloud and data centres have become interchangeable proxies for the same growth story, AI.” If anything, this growth story has accelerated even further. Morgan Stanley research is forecasting cloud infrastructure spending (capital expenditure) to grow by 44% in 2024 compared to a sluggish 2% last year. Goldman Sachs analysts have taken guidance from the recent quarterly results calls of Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft and projected capital expenditure from these four alone of almost $200 billion by 2025. The investment numbers are staggering and, for the major cloud infrastructure centres like Frankfurt, the headlines announcing new spend are coming thick and fast. Check out the following in just the past few weeks: Real estate firm Tishman moves into data centres, plans Frankfurt campus – Data Centre Dynamics Digital Realty investment fund expands stake in Frankfurt data centre – Techerati Clearly, the Frankfurt Data Centre World event will be busy. However, in reaching for the cloud, Germany and other fast-growing infrastructure centres will be increasingly mindful of other risk ‘clouds’ on the horizon. The sheer speed of data centre construction runs the risk of outpacing the other critical infrastructure required for cloud computing on a massive scale. Think of the electricity grid pressures to power the data centres and a recent International Energy Agency report suggesting data centre electricity usage is set to double by 2026. Then consider a recent Financial Times article highlighting the same imminent doubling of electricity power demands and the stunning data point of Microsoft “opening a new data centre globally every three days”. Earlier this month Bob Blue, chief executive of Dominion Energy, one of America’s biggest utilities, said that data-centre developers now frequently ask him for “several gigawatts” of power compared to Dominion’s total installed power base of 34 gigawatts (GW). Strains on global power grids are now a fact of life but there might be an even more basic power being overlooked. Skilled labour. A recent conversation with a City-based analyst highlighted the plight of the mining sector and the average worker age profile approaching 65 (!). However, it’s not just old economy sectors facing skills crises. A 2023 report from IT consultant, Onnec, stated that 94% of operators experienced a shortage of experienced data centre construction teams. In February Germany’s own Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, flagged 700,000 unfilled vacancies and official estimates of the country losing 7 million skilled workers by 2035. The double-whammy of a power and manpower crunch coming down the tracks is a real challenge which could derail the cloud opportunity. However, there is one encouraging development. Money is not the solution to all problems but it certainly helps. Clearly, a huge amount of investment capital chasing dreams in the AI cloud will look at the risks and see a need for additional investment in new power grid infrastructure and skills training. However, big tech companies investing on their own can’t carry the entire investment burden. So, what is needed is probably government spend but also another big pool of private money. And there’s some good news. The reports this week of private equity (PE) giant, Apollo Global, potentially co-investing $11 billion to help build a semiconductor chip factory in Ireland is the latest example of private equity getting involved in cloud infrastructure, in a big way. Also, another PE monster, Blackstone, has just announced the purchase of the abandoned Britishvolt gigafactory as the planned site for a $10 billion data centre campus. The entry of private equity and trillions of investment dollars into the data centre sector is hugely significant. Furthermore, the size of this private investment pool opens up the possibility of addressing the challenges of grid pressures and skills shortages. Or, as the financial markets commentariat might say… “money finds a way.” Germany hopefully will too.
In SilverBack we often talk about lived values demonstrated by leaders and employees alike. In particular, we want to be empathetic – understanding one another and mindful of staff’s needs and vulnerabilities away from home. So, we are thrilled to be sponsoring the Hillerød Wolfe Tones and congratulate them on their recent win in the 2023 Intermediate Gaelic Football Championships, their second trophy won over the last 12 months!
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If you have any questions or would like to know more about our services, please get in touch with us.
Address
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Dublin 9, D09 CC92, Ireland
