As artificial intelligence threatens to upend job markets in countries around the world, Nvidia Corp Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang brushed off longer-term concerns and made the case that skilled vocational workers are seeing increasing demand now.<\/p>\n
Plumbers, electricians and construction workers are going to be able to command \u201csix-figure salaries,\u201d thanks to demand to build data centers that run and train artificial intelligence, he said in an interview with BlackRock. CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. The technology will require one of the biggest infrastructure buildouts in history, with trillions of dollars in new investment, Huang said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing quite a significant boom in this area. Salaries have gone up nearly double,\u201d Huang said. \u201cEverybody should be able to make a great living. You don\u2019t need to have a PhD in computer science to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huang\u2019s comments echo remarks made at Davos on Tuesday by Palantir Technologies Inc. CEO Alex Karp., who praised workers with \u201cvocational training\u201d and said AI would create more local jobs and largely eliminate the need for mass immigration. Coreweave\u2019s Michael Intrator also touched on the \u201cphysicality\u201d of the AI boom at a panel later on Wednesday, with the data center firm\u2019s CEO describing the need for growing numbers of plumbers, electricians and carpenters.<\/p>\n
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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 $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 \u2014 Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. \u2014 but it\u2019s striking deals with a growing number of smaller data center operators. Tech firms have committed to spend a combined $500 billion in data center leases in the coming years.<\/p>\n
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AI\u2019s impact on the job market is already being felt. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned about a \u201cwhite-collar bloodbath\u201d that could wipe out 50% of entry-level jobs. The company\u2019s Claude AI is gaining attention for its coding abilities, a feature that could displace more junior programmers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re entering a world where the junior-level software engineers \u2013 maybe many of the tasks of the more senior-level software engineers \u2014 are starting to be done most of the way by AI systems. Now that\u2019s going to go further,\u201d Amodei said in an interview at Bloomberg House in Davos on Tuesday. While he believes the good from the technology will outweigh the bad, high unemployment and underemployment are a risk that needs to be mitigated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s going to be unfortunately a whole class of people who are, across a lot of industries, going to have a hard time coping,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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On Wednesday, Fink noticeably avoided probing Huang on sensitive topics, most notably China. Nvidia\u2019s 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. Just yesterday, Amodei called shipping Nvidia chips into China similar to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.<\/p>\n
Huang is expected to visit China at the end of this month as he works to reopen a crucial market for the company\u2019s artificial intelligence chips. It\u2019s a pivotal time for the business, after the US moved to ease limits on chip exports to China it\u2019s had in place since 2022. Nvidia is still blocked from shipping the top-of-the-line chips to the country, stymieing Beijing\u2019s ability to innovate beyond the cutting-edge of AI, but will be able to ship older-generation H200 AI chips.<\/p>\n
China, meanwhile, is expected to clear H200 imports for commercial use in the first three months of 2026, though it won\u2019t 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\u2019s most prominent tech firms, including Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance, have privately expressed interest in ordering than 200 000 units each of the chip.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2026 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
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