Nvidia's CEO says ‘a lot’ of six-figure jobs in plumbing and construction are about to be unlocked - Fortune
Jensen Huang, the man who sells the shovels for the AI gold rush, has finally told us who the real winners are: plumbers, electricians and construction workers. The Nvidia CEO says 'a lot' of six-figure jobs are about to be 'unlocked' — a choice of verb that makes a career in sewage systems sound like it involves a blockchain. Behind the wordplay is $7 trillion in global capital outlays by the end of the decade, megacorporations frantically building windowless cathedrals to the GPU. One must admire the honesty: after all the talk of artificial general intelligence, the immediate demand is for humans who can fix a leaking radiator.
It is a gloriously self-refuting pitch. The AI industry's core promise is that silicon brains will replace swathes of the workforce, yet its most visible labour shortage is in trades that require a real body on a real ladder. When Huang says 'a lot', note the carefully studied vagueness: no number, no breakdown, no timeline, just the smile of a man who knows every analyst in the room is computing his net worth instead. Six figures is conjured with all the precision of a GPU benchmark on a marketing slide, and the end of the decade is conveniently far enough that nobody can hold anyone to account.
Still, let us enjoy the moment. It is not often that an AI billionaire admits his technology's short-term impact is to create manual labour that the AI cannot do itself. For a brief window, the plumber is the prince of the AI revolution, standing on a pile of copper pipe while Jensen counts the trillions. But do not mistake this for a bright new world of dignified work: these are the construction crews erecting the factories that will eventually assemble the robots that will eventually weld the pipes — and after that, the six-figure jobs become a museum exhibit. So it goes; the golden age of the trades is the AI economy's final closing shift, and the overtime is lovely while it lasts.