On September 1, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI revolution won’t just eliminate jobs — it will also create “hundreds of thousands” of new ones, especially for skilled tradespeople like electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and technicians. As chip plants, packaging facilities, data centers, and “AI factories” keep getting built, he argued, the US will need far more workers who can “build things with their hands.”
Huang said technological revolutions always reshape the job market. “Some jobs will be eliminated, but many new jobs will appear,” he said. White-collar work won’t vanish anytime soon, he added — but the AI infrastructure buildout is about to spark a boom in the skilled trades.
That demand is already visible: reports suggest the US could have roughly 2.1 million unfilled skilled-trade positions by 2030, including about 130,000 new electrician roles. Data center construction is also scaling up quickly — data center firm QTS expects its project-site workforce to grow from around 10,000 workers in 2025 to 40,000 by the end of 2026.
Huang has previously called the AI infrastructure push “one of the largest infrastructure builds in human history.” With data centers, power systems, and cooling facilities all expanding, the skilled-labor shortage could become a serious bottleneck for the AI industry’s next phase of growth.