The gold rush needed miners; the fracking boom needed welders; the AI surge needs fiber technicians.
Meta on Monday announced a new program with real estate partner CBRE to train new fiber technicians in four weeks.
The sprint to build out new data centers has exposed America’s shortage of construction workers who can set up and operate the physical infrastructure of the AI age.
“The future of the AI revolution depends on a highly skilled US workforce — one that rises to the challenge of building and maintaining the complex systems that power innovation,” Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said in a statement.
Most of the stock market’s attention has been on the supply of chips and GPUs that power AI computing, while the fiber-optic networks that connect it all have drawn comparatively less fanfare.
Meta said the free four-week program is set to begin this summer and equip trainees with the skills to work in these new data centers, as well as the construction industry more broadly.
The company said it has 27 data centers across the US and that those projects have employed more than 30,000 people during construction and another 5,000 workers who continue to work as site managers and engineers.
Meta is currently working on several multi-gigawatt data centers that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said will come online as the company races to catch up on AI computing capacity.
Meta is among the 14 largest data center operators that are on track to collectively spend more than $750 billion in 2026, with construction underway at more than 800 sites, according to Bloomberg.
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