As artificial intelligence threatens to upend job markets in several countries, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang played down long-term concerns and argued that technical and vocational professionals are already seeing demand increase.
Plumbers, electricians and construction workers will earn “six-figure salaries” thanks to demand for building data centers that run and train AI systems, Huang said in an interview with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this Wednesday. According to him, the technology will require one of the largest infrastructure expansions in history, with trillions of dollars in new investments.
“We are seeing a very significant boom in this area. Salaries have practically doubled,” said Huang. “Everyone should be able to make a great income. You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science to do that.”
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Huang’s comments echo statements made in Davos on Tuesday by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who praised workers with “technical/vocational training” and said AI would create more local jobs and virtually eliminate the need for mass immigration. Coreweave’s Michael Intrator also mentioned the “physicality” of the AI boom in a panel later on Wednesday, with the data center company’s CEO describing the growing need for plumbers, electricians and carpenters.
A leader in making chips that power and run the most advanced AI models, Nvidia has been benefiting from the race to build data centers. The company is on track to generate nearly $200 billion in data center chip sales by 2025, according to an average analyst estimate compiled by Bloomberg. So far, most of its revenue has come from the biggest data center builders — Microsoft, Meta, Amazon.com and Alphabet — but the company has also been closing deals with a growing number of smaller operators. Technology companies have already committed to collectively spending US$500 billion on data center leases over the next few years.
The impact of AI on the job market is already being felt. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned of a “white-collar bloodbath” that could eliminate 50% of entry-level positions. Claude, the company’s AI, has been attracting attention for its programming capabilities, which can replace part of the work of junior developers.
“We’re entering a world where the jobs of junior software engineers — and perhaps many of the jobs of more senior engineers — are starting to be done largely by AI systems. And that’s going to go even further,” Amodei said in an interview at Bloomberg House in Davos on Tuesday. Although he believes the benefits of technology will outweigh the costs, Amodei sees high unemployment and underemployment as risks that need to be mitigated.
“Unfortunately, there will be a whole class of people who, in many sectors, will have a lot of difficulty adapting,” he said.
On Wednesday, Fink avoided touching on sensitive topics with Huang, especially China. Nvidia’s sales to the country are the subject of controversy, and the company is awaiting a definition of whether it will be able to sell its chips to the Chinese market and in what volume. The day before, Amodei himself compared sending Nvidia chips to China to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”.
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Huang is expected to visit China later this month as he seeks to reopen a crucial market for the company’s AI chips. It is a decisive moment for the business, after the US announced a partial easing of restrictions on semiconductor exports to China that have been in place since 2022. Nvidia is still prevented from shipping its cutting-edge chips to the country — which limits Beijing’s ability to advance the technological frontier of AI — but will be able to sell previous generation models, such as the H200 chips.
China, in turn, is expected to release H200 imports for commercial use in the first three months of 2026, although it will not allow the use of these chips in military applications, sensitive government bodies, critical infrastructure or state-owned companies, Bloomberg News reported. Some of the biggest Chinese big techs, such as Alibaba and ByteDance, have already privately expressed interest in ordering more than 200,000 units of each of these chips.
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