The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

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America should build before it surrenders to AI to collect government checks

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The artificial-intelligence revolution may eventually replace some American jobs. Right now, however, it is unleashing a construction and energy buildout that desperately needs American workers.

On Monday, Nvidia announced agreements with six Wall Street giants aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are participating in the new financing platforms.

The money is intended to help build the data centers, chip factories and power facilities required to feed an industry whose appetite for electricity and computing power appears to have misplaced its off switch.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the financing would allow companies to obtain the enormous amounts of computing capacity they need.

“These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI.”

The announcement adds another massive pool of private capital to an American AI buildout that already includes OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate initiative and Micron’s planned $250 billion investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research.

Former labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer says Washington should view this as an opportunity to put Americans to work—not as an excuse to begin paying them to withdraw from the workforce.

“The real fight in this country right now is not left versus right,” Chavez-DeRemer wrote in a Fox News opinion column.

Instead, she argued, the choice is whether America responds to technological change “by paying millions of workers to disappear” or launches the largest infrastructure mobilization since the interstate highway system.

The public discussion surrounding AI employment has focused primarily on which white-collar jobs algorithms may eliminate.

But ChatGPT does not float through the atmosphere on magic dust. AI requires enormous physical facilities filled with processors, cooling systems, fiber, transformers and backup generators. Those buildings require electricity on a scale that is forcing utilities to construct new power plants, transmission lines and substations.

Someone has to pour the concrete, run the conduit, weld the pipe and keep the cooling system operating.

Chavez-DeRemer said those demands are creating major opportunities for electricians, pipefitters, ironworkers, HVAC technicians and operating engineers.

“Data centers, the physical backbone of the AI economy, are going up faster than anything we have built in recent memory.”

A single major facility can employ more than 1,000 skilled tradespeople during peak construction. On projects offering extensive overtime and travel pay, experienced workers can earn six-figure incomes without first accumulating four years of college tuition bills.

The Labor Department projects electrician employment will grow 9% between 2024 and 2034, three times the average growth rate for all occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects approximately 81,000 electrician openings annually over that decade.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers has already seen the effects. In Louisiana, a Meta data-center project was expected to create as many as 5,000 construction jobs, according to the union. IBEW officials reported that nearly every member seeking work in the area already had it.

That is a rather different picture from the one painted by those who imagine the AI economy as millions of displaced workers sitting at home waiting for a government deposit.

Huang has repeatedly emphasized the trades required to build the industry’s physical foundation.

“This is the largest technology infrastructure buildout in human history and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America.”

He continued:

“To support AI, America will build chip factories, computer factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities across the country.”

In January, Huang described AI infrastructure as a five-layer system encompassing energy, chips, data centers, models and software applications. The bottom layers do not exist without physical labor. OpenAI made a similarly sweeping promise when it announced Stargate in January 2025:

“This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world.”

Stargate announced plans to invest up to $500 billion over four years, beginning with an initial $100 billion deployment.

Micron has since increased its projected American manufacturing and research commitment from $200 billion to $250 billion. Its planned facilities in New York, Idaho and Virginia are expected to support tens of thousands of direct and related jobs.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra summarized the strategy:

“This is American investment. American technology. American workers.”

That is exactly the message Republicans should be carrying into union halls, trade schools and working-class communities that spent decades watching factories disappear overseas.

Chavez-DeRemer, the daughter of a Teamster, argued that the federal government should expand registered apprenticeships and remove permitting obstacles slowing the construction of new energy facilities.

“The right answer is to lean in, to expand registered apprenticeships, cut the permitting red tape that slows power projects, and get serious about training the next generation of electricians and pipefitters.”

Meta has already joined Mike Rowe in launching a $115 million trade-training initiative aimed at electricians, plumbers, welders and fiber technicians. The program pays certain students during training, covers certification and transportation costs and promises job-placement assistance.

The initial sites are in Louisiana, Ohio, Texas and Indiana—places where “learn to code” was never much of an economic plan for laid-off factory workers.

The opportunity is real, but the timing matters. Electrician apprenticeships can take several years, and construction demand may move between regions as projects are completed. Training programs must produce broadly qualified tradespeople, not workers prepared for only one data center that may be finished before they graduate.

An electrician trained properly can move from a data center to a factory, power plant, hospital or commercial construction site. That portability is what turns a temporary project into a durable career.

Chavez-DeRemer’s target is not imaginary. Elon Musk has argued that artificial intelligence and robotics could ultimately make traditional employment optional. He recently wrote:

“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has proposed versions of universal income or shared AI ownership, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested that severe job displacement could require UBI funded by taxes on companies or capital gains.

The underlying concern is legitimate. Construction work created by AI infrastructure will not necessarily replace every accountant, writer, analyst or customer-service representative displaced by AI software.

A 50-year-old office worker cannot simply be handed a hard hat Monday and sent up a high-voltage transmission tower Tuesday. But Chavez-DeRemer argues that surrendering to mass unemployment before it arrives would send a disastrous cultural message.

“The pitch is that artificial intelligence will eliminate work, so the government should write every American a check and call it compassion.”

Her response:

“It isn’t compassion. It is surrender.”

She added:

“Work is not just a paycheck. It is the thing that lets a parent stand up, look their kids in the eye, and say, ‘I built this.’”

There is also the small matter of paying for a permanent check to every American. UBI proposals often sound delightfully simple until somebody reaches the section marked “taxes.”

There is one important caveat in the AI employment celebration.

Data centers create far more construction jobs than permanent operating positions. Once a facility is completed, automation allows many sites to function with relatively small full-time staffs.

The Census Bureau found that direct data-center employment rose more than 60% between 2016 and 2023, but the industry still represented a relatively modest share of total American employment. Some individual facilities employ only dozens or a few hundred permanent workers after construction crews leave. That does not make the construction jobs fake. Tradespeople routinely move from one project to the next. A years-long national buildout can sustain careers even if each individual data center eventually operates with a lean workforce.

But politicians should not promise a small town 5,000 permanent jobs when they really mean 5,000 workers during construction and perhaps a fraction of that number afterward.

The real employment opportunity is broader, data centers, semiconductor plants, power generation, electrical-grid upgrades, transmission construction, equipment manufacturing and the supply chains connecting all of them.

AI will disrupt the labor market. Pretending otherwise would be foolish.

But it would be equally foolish to conclude that technology has rendered American workers obsolete while the companies building it are warning that they cannot find enough electricians.

Government should concentrate first on preparing workers for the jobs being created: apprenticeships, portable credentials, vocational education, faster permitting and private-sector partnerships that connect training directly to employment.

If AI eventually produces unemployment on a scale the economy cannot absorb, policymakers can confront that reality with actual evidence.

They should not preemptively transform millions of Americans into government dependents because Silicon Valley executives have imagined a robotic utopia where money no longer matters.

The servers still need buildings. The buildings need power. The power plants need workers. The future, despite all the talk about automation, still requires somebody to show up and build it.

WIRE SOURCES

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