Nvidia CEO says AI will create jobs for electricians and plumbers that pay six figures

AS ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) threatens to upends job markets in countries around the world, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang brushed off longer-term concerns and made the case that skilled vocational workers are seeing increasing demand now.

Plumbers, electricians and construction workers are going to be able to command “six-figure salaries”, thanks to demand to build data centers that run and train AI, he said in an interview with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday (Jan 21).

The technology will require one of the biggest infrastructure buildouts in history, with trillions of dollars in new investment, Huang said.

“We’re seeing quite a significant boom in this area. Salaries have gone up nearly double,” Huang said. “Everybody should be able to make a great living. You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science to do so.”

Huang’s comments echo remarks made at Davos on Tuesday by Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp, who praised workers with “vocational training” and said AI would create more local jobs and largely eliminate the need for mass immigration.

Coreweave’s Michael Intrator also touched on the “physicality” of the AI boom at a panel later on Wednesday, with the data center firm’s CEO describing the need for growing numbers of plumbers, electricians and carpenters. 

Nvidia, the leading maker of chips that help power and run the latest AI models, has benefited from the huge rush to build data centers. The company is on track to generate almost US$200 billion in data center chip sales for 2025, according to an average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg.

To date, the bulk of its revenue comes from the biggest data center builders – Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Alphabet – but it’s striking deals with a growing number of smaller data center operators. Tech firms have committed to spend a combined US$500 billion in data center leases in the coming years.

AI’s impact on the job market is already being felt. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned about a “white-collar bloodbath” that could wipe out 50 per cent of entry-level jobs. The company’s Claude AI is gaining attention for its coding abilities, a feature that could displace more junior programmers. 

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“We’re entering a world where the junior-level software engineers – maybe many of the tasks of the more senior-level software engineers – are starting to be done most of the way by AI systems. Now that’s going to go further,” Amodei said.

While he believes the good from the technology will outweigh the bad, high unemployment and underemployment are risks that need to be mitigated. 

“There’s going to be unfortunately a whole class of people who are, across a lot of industries, going to have a hard time coping,” he said. 

On Wednesday, Fink noticeably avoided probing Huang on sensitive topics, most notably China. Nvidia’s sales to the country are controversial, and the company is waiting to hear whether it will be able to sell its chips to the country and in what quantities. On Tuesday, Amodei called shipping Nvidia chips into China similar to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. 

Huang is expected to visit China at the end of this month as he works to reopen a crucial market for the company’s AI chips.

It is a pivotal time for the business, after the US moved to ease limits on chip exports to China it’s had in place since 2022. Nvidia is still blocked from shipping the top-of-the-line chips to the country, stymieing Beijing’s ability to innovate beyond the cutting-edge of AI, but will be able to ship older-generation H200 AI chips.

China, meanwhile, is expected to clear H200 imports for commercial use in the first three months of 2026, though it won’t allow the chips for use in the military, sensitive government agencies, critical infrastructure or its state-owned enterprises, Bloomberg News reported.

Some of the country’s most prominent tech firms, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have privately expressed interest in ordering than 200,000 units each of the chip. BLOOMBERG