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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the AI boom will create “six-figure salaries” for those building the factories supporting it — becoming the latest leader to recommend skilled trades as AI hits office jobs.
Huang, one of the foremost voices on artificial intelligence, struck an optimistic tone on its impact on the labor market in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday.
“This is the largest infrastructure build-out in human history that’s going to create a lot of jobs,” Huang said. “It’s wonderful that the jobs are related to trade craft, and we’re going to have plumbers and electricians and construction and steel workers, and network technicians, and people who install and fit out the equipment.”
Huang added that he was seeing “quite a significant boom” in this area, with salaries nearly doubling.
“And so we’re talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories,” he added.
The possibility of AI eliminating jobs has dominated conversations at WEF this week after the technology was seen as contributing to nearly 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, per December data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture, and Lufthansa were among the companies citing AI as a reason for laying off employees in 2025.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director at the International Monetary Fund, said Tuesday that AI is “hitting the labor market like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it.”
However, Microsoft’s research in 2025 found that blue-collar jobs were the least likely to be automated and hence safer from job cuts and layoffs. The roles named ranged from phlebotomists to helpers, painters, plasterers, and ship engineers.
The research, which analyzed data from 200,000 conversations with Microsoft Bing Copilot between January and September 2024, focused on how much users sought assistance from the chatbot to complete a task. Professionals who did physical work, whether with people or machines, were least likely to rely on AI.
“Everybody should be able to make a great living. You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science to do so,” Huang said.
Pursue vocational training
Roxana Mînzatu, EVP for social rights and skills, quality jobs, and preparedness at the European Commission, told CNBC in a conversation at WEF that young people should pursue vocational training in order to secure these blue-collar roles.
“There are a lot of job offers in the vocational direction. I’ve had a discussion with the semiconductor industry, those that produce the chips for communication. They’re looking for 75,000 vocational trained people — technicians [and] different types of degrees,” Mînzatu said.
When asked about AI taking away entry-level roles and making it harder to enter the job market, she said: “I’m not that concerned about the ability of the young generation to be able to have the right skills for that.”
Meanwhile, blue-collar jobs do appear to be more attractive to Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — in part because of the high cost of getting a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. CNBC Make It calculations in 2025 indicated that the annual cost of attending a four-year, in-state public college increased by about 30% between 2011 and 2023.
“There are about 2 million fewer students in a traditional four-year university now than in 2011,” Nich Tremper, senior economist at payroll and benefits platform Gusto, told CNBC Make It at the time.
In the first quarter of 2024, Gen Z made up 18% of the workforce, according to the Department of Labor, but formed nearly 25% of all new hires in skilled trade work that year, according to Gusto.
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