The staff shortfall in the IT space is truly staggering.

ManpowerGroup suggests that 75% of global IT firms are struggling to fill roles due to a lack of skilled talent. And despite never-ending rounds of tech-sector layoffs, CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce projects the U.S. tech workforce will grow at twice the rate of the overall U.S. workforce.

But when looking solely at the networking segment, the stats get frankly egregious.

Around 25%. That’s roughly the percentage of network engineers expected to retire in the next five years, according to Opengear figures.

Digging deeper, some 95% of U.S.-based CIOs surveyed by Opengear admit that a deficiency in engineering staff has led to a greater inability to manage their networks. Meanwhile, some 91% of U.S. engineers say that the networks they manage have been impacted due to a lack of skills – a number that drops to 81% on a global scale, but still a scary stat nonetheless.

So while talk of more skilling might be one way to address it, the folks over at Megaport’s Latitude brand have gone in the opposite direction: data centers where everything is automated.

It might have seemed an odd decision for a network-as-a-service (NaaS) firm to acquire an automated compute platform, but that’s exactly what happened when Megaport acquired Latitude in November 2025.

Founded in Brazil, Latitude.sh (formerly Maxihost) developed software capable of handling provisioning, monitoring, and routing means inside a facility. Simply put, day-to-day data center operations are treated entirely by a click-to-deploy software platform, meaning next to no humans on site.

“It’s almost like a cloud,” Megaport CEO Michael Reid explained to SDxCentral. “In a cloud, you’re normally running some sort of virtual machine (VM); what we deliver is physical compute. So you actually run bare metal by clicking, and deploy an entire piece of physical infrastructure in whatever location that we're in.”

In a way, then, Megaport's Latitude arm turns the data center into an almost remote-like programmable appliance. And with the software running the show, it means little to no staff are needed at any one time.

“We don't have any staff ... no staff are on site at all at any one time, unless there’s an outage or there’s an issue with a server that comes offline, and we replace that,” Reid outlined.

While a staffless data center might sound slightly shocking to some, Reid explained that the Latitude concept instills resilience by design. For example, if a server dies, they don’t fix it in-place immediately; instead, they simply spin up new capacity next to it and backfill the failed hardware on a maintenance cycle. Major incidents are, however, responded to in “one hit,” Reid added.

As a result, Latitude only employs around 80 people globally, including developers and engineering staff, yet they’re running automated bare-metal workloads across 24 locations in 10 countries.

But going from humble beginnings in Brazil, where two brothers essentially cracked the code to automated infrastructure operations and management, to selling access to fast-provisioning compute at a time when every man and his dog is desperate for high-end GPUs, is where Reid said the importance of Megaport comes in.

For the CEO, the logic behind the acquisition was less about a left‑field bet on compute and more about completing the three-piece puzzle it was already known for wiring together. As Reid put it, every application running on Latitude ultimately rests on the three core pillars of infrastructure: compute, storage, and network – with Megaport already a specialist in stitching these assets together.

Latitude becomes the automated compute layer that Megaport didn’t have, providing bare metal compute that can be spun up in seconds across many of the same facilities where Megaport already had deep network reach.

For Latitude, the acquisition solved a scale and credibility problem it may have struggled to crack alone. The Brazilian startup had already grown rapidly to tens-of-millions in annual recurring revenue (ARR) on the back of its automation software stack, but ran straight into capex constraints and the enterprise sales barrier that comes with being a small, bootstrapped outfit in a risk-averse market.

Folding Latitude into Megaport’s balance sheet, compliance posture, and – perhaps most important of all – its global sales machine effectively took that bare metal idea and turned it into something large enterprises can actually buy at scale.

“The growth has been awesome and has pivoted very heavily to AI,” Reid said. “AI companies are just sucking down everything they can get at the moment. So when you're publicly traded and profitable, it makes it much easier for enterprises to choose you.”

Reid outlined the AI use case that Megaport-owned Latitude has seen heavy customer interest in of late, which has been AI sandboxes – secure, isolated environments where developers can test and develop AI systems and tools without fear of data leakage.

“What they're spinning up is agents,” Reid said. “They're spinning up thousands and thousands and thousands of agents, and they're requiring huge, high-performance compute with massive memory from us.”

The timing coincided with the increasing interest in "claws" – autonomous agents capable of running locally, with the concept stemming from OpenClaw as developed by Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI.

“Some of it probably is OpenClaw, but we don't actually know what's been run on it,” Reid said, referencing Latitude’s bare metal approach in that the vendor only provides the physical infrastructure and doesn’t actively monitor or inspect the specific applications, data, or workloads customers are running on their servers

“We know companies are buying [claws], and then, in theory, all the different code loads that they could be running, they can run lots and lots of different options," Reid said. "If you think of all the open source AI tools, all of those could be built on Latitue and run as an agent. But we don't know what it is.”

But for all the demand of agents and claws, at the heart of Megaport’s Latitude bet is a staff-light, programmable infrastructure capable of being delivered over its existing network fabric as a more realistic way to tackle the networking and compute talent shortfall without trying – and failing – to hire its way out of.