WATCH: Exclusive look at blue-collar workforce fueling America’s AI boom - Fox News

The good news from Houston is that the AI boom has created jobs you cannot do from a standing desk. Fox News Digital got an inside look at a training site in Texas preparing blue-collar workers for construction jobs tied to the infrastructure buildout powering American AI. The site will host a new training program under America's Workforce Academy, a Meta-backed initiative — which is a generous way of saying the company best known for feeding your aunt's Facebook feed has noticed that data centres do not pour their own concrete.

Then there is the quote, courtesy of ABC vice president Joel Thames, who calls it "the largest workforce development investment in history." Marvellous. The excerpt contains no dollar figure, no number of trainees, no timeline — which is precisely how one claims a superlative. "Largest in history" is the cheapest sentence in corporate communications: it costs nothing, it cannot be checked against the passage supplied, and it photographs beautifully beside a hard hat. Meta, for its part, has not put a number on its own generosity either.

And what a tidy arrangement it is. Workers get trained to build the physical plant for an industry whose loudest sales pitch is that human labour is an expensive legacy system. Houston's newest construction cohort will raise the halls that house the models, and the models will then be marketed to the firms that employ their cousins. America's Workforce Academy is developing the workforce, all right; it is merely worth noting who is holding the shovel, who is holding the deed, and which end of that arrangement is expected to still exist in a decade. Still — the largest investment in history. No receipts required.