The US needs a blue-collar workforce boom to compete in AI, Meta president says

• Meta's president said the US needs a "whole new workforce" to compete in the AI race.
• The US will need 500,000 electricians in 2 years to build AI infrastructure, Dina Powell McCormick said.
• "These are the real heroes that are building the very infrastructure that will help us win," she said.

America's effort to win the AI race may hinge on tradespeople.

That's according to Meta's president and vice chairman, Dina Powell McCormick, who said the US will need a "whole new workforce" to stay competitive in artificial intelligence.

"When we talk about America and how critical it is that we're competitive in the AI race, we need a whole new workforce," Powell McCormick said at the Axios AI Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday.

While much of the attention around AI has focused on chips, models, and engineers, she pointed to what she called "the workforce of America," the tradespeople responsible for building the physical infrastructure behind the technology.

"Just in the next two years, 500,000 electricians are needed to build all the infrastructure that's going to be needed just in the United States," she said.

Her comments come as Meta and other tech giants are cutting roles and reshaping their workforces while pouring billions into AI.

Meta began laying off hundreds of employees this week across divisions including Reality Labs, recruiting, sales, and global operations, according to a person familiar with the matter and LinkedIn posts from affected staff.

At the same time, a leaked internal memo obtained by Business Insider shows the company is reorganizing parts of Reality Labs into small, "AI-native" pods of "AI builders," part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push to make Meta leaner and more productive with AI.

The cuts reflect a broader shift across Big Tech, where companies are using AI to do more with fewer people, especially in corporate and software roles, even as demand for skilled labor in construction, energy, and data center development surges.

"And so we talk about it as the workforce of America because if you're competing on behalf of America, these are the real heroes that are building the very infrastructure that will help us win," Powell McCormick said.

The AI boom is driving demand for a new kind of worker

Powell McCormick isn't the only executive to have emphasized the need for tradespeople, as the AI infrastructure booms.

At the World Economic Forum in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it was a good time to be a tradesperson because the AI boom is creating demand for manual labor to build data centers.

In his annual letter to shareholders, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said the AI boom is already driving demand for skilled tradespeople building the infrastructure behind it.

Speaking on the live-streamed tech show TBPN earlier this month, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the AI boom could make plumbers far more valuable, adding that if most of the world were automated, physical work would become the "long pole in the tent" for progress.