Photo: Nvidia Corporation / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

As artificial intelligence changes the world of work, young people often hear that finding a job will become increasingly difficult for them.

But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes the opposite. According to him, a huge wave of new jobs is emerging right now, but not in the IT sector, rather in skilled trades.

“We will need hundreds of thousands of electricians, plumbers, and carpenters to build all these new factories and data centers,” Huang told Channel 4 News in the United Kingdom. He added that the skilled trades segment will grow year after year and that every economy must double its investment in this workforce.

Huang backs up his words with concrete investments. Nvidia recently announced a $100 billion investment in collaboration with OpenAI, intended for the development of data centers based on their AI processors. Analysts at McKinsey estimate that global investment in this industry could reach as much as $7 trillion by 2030.

A single data center measuring 250 thousand square feet can employ up to 1,500 construction workers during its construction, and many of them earn more than $100 thousand a year, without a college degree. Once the center is completed, around 50 permanent workers maintain the systems, and each such job creates another three and a half new ones in the surrounding economy.

Huang believes that the new opportunity lies not in coding, but in the physical side of technology. When journalists asked him what he would study today if he were twenty years old, he admitted that he would choose natural and technical sciences, not computer science.

Other leading executives share a similar view. BlackRock chief Larry Fink warned the White House that the United States faces a shortage of skilled workers, especially electricians needed to build AI infrastructure. Ford CEO Jim Farley also warned that ambitious plans to bring manufacturing back to the United States cannot be realized without people to do that work. The country is currently short about 600 thousand factory workers and another half a million construction workers.

Despite this, the new generation is slowly recognizing the opportunity. Twenty-three-year-old Jacob Palmer from North Carolina dropped out of college, completed an electrician apprenticeship, and opened his own company at just 21. Last year he earned nearly $90 thousand, and this year he has already crossed the six-figure threshold. “I don’t owe anyone anything,” Palmer told Fortune, while many of his peers are only just paying off student loans and looking for their first job.