Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a message for people worried that artificial intelligence will hollow out the job market: some of the biggest winners may be the people who wire buildings and run pipe.
According to Fortune, Huang said "a lot" of six-figure jobs in plumbing and construction are about to be unlocked. A report carried on MSN put it more bluntly, quoting Huang saying "you don't need a PhD" to earn six figures, and framing the AI boom as something that will create $100,000 jobs for electricians and plumbers.
The reasoning is physical, not theoretical. AI runs on data centers, and data centers are buildings — concrete, conduit, cooling, and enormous electrical loads. That MSN report describes the data center buildout as creating a shortage of electricians and tradespeople, and shortages of skilled labor tend to push pay up.
It's worth noting who is making the argument. Huang runs the company whose chips sit at the center of the AI buildout, so he has an obvious interest in the boom continuing and in the public seeing it as a source of opportunity rather than a threat. Neither source item provides underlying data on how many such jobs will appear, or over what timeframe.
Why it matters: the loudest debate about AI has been about which white-collar jobs it erases, and one of the industry's most prominent figures is arguing the opposite story is unfolding in the trades — where the work can't be automated away because someone still has to physically build the machines that think.