Jensen Huang says plumbers and electricians will earn six figures from AI boom

Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, sat next to Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, on stage Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland. The boys spoke at a World Economic Forum panel about how AI is hitting the labor market fast and hard.

Jensen predicts that skilled trade workers are about to be paid like never before. He said the world’s rush to build out AI infrastructure means trades like plumbing and electrical work are now in high demand.

“Plumbers, electricians, and construction workers are going to be able to command six-figure salaries,” Jensen told Larry. He said wages are already rising fast. “Salaries have gone up nearly double,” he said. “You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science to do so.”

Nvidia pushes chips while trades take the spotlight

The explosion of AI data centers is now creating one of the largest infrastructure booms ever, Jensen said. It’s going to take trillions of dollars to build everything needed to run these systems.

That means more jobs, especially for people with hands-on skills. Jensen said everyone should be able to make a good living from this wave of work.

His comments matched what Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, said the day before. Alex said vocational training is more valuable than ever and claimed AI would make local hiring easier by cutting down on the need for mass immigration.

Then later that day, Michael Intrator, CEO of CoreWeave, brought up the same point. He said the AI boom is physical and growing fast, and there’s already more demand for carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.

On the tech side, Nvidia is riding the wave. The company builds the chips that run AI models, and demand is through the roof. Analysts expect Nvidia to rake in nearly $200 billion in data center chip sales in 2025.

Jensen said most of that still comes from big names like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, but smaller companies are now signing deals too. Across the board, tech firms have committed to more than $500 billion in data center leases over the next few years.

Not everyone’s excited about what AI means for jobs. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said a lot of office work is already disappearing. He warned that junior roles, especially in software, are at risk.

“We’re entering a world where the junior-level software engineers, maybe many of the tasks of the more senior-level software engineers, are starting to be done most of the way by AI systems,” Dario said in Davos.

He called it a “white-collar bloodbath” and said up to 50% of entry-level jobs could vanish. “There’s going to be, unfortunately, a whole class of people who are, across a lot of industries, going to have a hard time coping.”

China questions hang over Nvidia’s sales strategy

Larry stayed away from touchy topics, but the issue of China didn’t go unnoticed. Jensen didn’t mention it himself, but Dario had just compared selling Nvidia chips to China with selling “nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

Tensions are high. Nvidia is still blocked from sending its most advanced chips to China, and the company is waiting to see what U.S. regulators say next.

Still, Jensen has plans. He’s expected to visit China at the end of the month to push chip sales again. The U.S. has relaxed some export restrictions, and Nvidia is now allowed to sell its older H200 chips. It’s not the top-tier stuff, but it’s something. And China is interested.

Cryptopolitan earlier reported that the country could approve H200 chips for commercial use in the first three months of 2026. The chips won’t be allowed for military use or anything involving state-owned infrastructure, but that hasn’t stopped companies from lining up.

Alibaba and ByteDance are both looking to buy over 200,000 units each, sources say. That’s a huge deal. If those orders come through, it means Nvidia could still have a strong foothold in China, even with the export rules in place. And with that kind of volume, the demand for labor (not just in tech, but in construction) will only keep climbing.

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