Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that the build-out of infrastructure to support the artificial intelligence (AI) technology boom is boosting the salaries of construction trade workers who are involved with those projects.
The Nvidia co-founder spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and was asked by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who is the WEF interim co-chair, about how the rise of AI will change the nature of work.
“First of all, 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 tradecraft – we’re going to have plumbers and electricians and construction and steelworkers and network technicians and people who install and fit out the equipment.”
“We’re seeing quite a significant boom in this area. Salaries have gone up nearly double, and so we’re talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories,” Huang said.
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“We have a great shortage in that, and I’m really delighted to see so many people in so many countries recognizing this important area,” he added. “Everybody should be able to make a great living. You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science to do so.”
During his discussion with Fink, the Nvidia CEO went into detail about the different levels of AI infrastructure and how they rely upon each other.
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“When you think about AI, you think about the AI models, but it’s really important to understand that industrially, AI is actually essentially a five-layer cake. At the bottom is energy. AI, because it’s processed in real time, and it generates intelligence in real time, it needs energy to do so,” he said.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA CORP. | 184.84 | +1.52 | +0.83% |
Huang said that the layers above energy are chips and then cloud services. Above those are AI models, as well as the top layer in his analogy – the application layer in which AI is used for some productive use to generate economic benefits.
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“The important thing, though, because this computing platform requires all of the layers underneath it, it has started – and everybody is seeing it right now – it has started the largest infrastructure build-out in human history,” Huang said.
He added that AI’s rise will require “trillions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to be built out” and said that investment will be “sensible because all of these contexts have to be processed so that the models can generate the intelligence necessary to power the applications that sit on top.”
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