Jun 12, 2026
If you’ve ever considered quitting your job and starting a new life as an electrician or a plumber, now might be the time to do it.
“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe has enthusiastically promoted Meta’s new program that will pay for people to train for work in the trades. Through America’s Workforce Academy (AWA), Meta (NASDAQ:META) had pledged to put $115 million toward training for jobs including plumbing, electrical work and mechanical systems.
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All AWA graduates are guaranteed a job with a Meta partner construction site once they’ve graduated the five-week course. But Meta isn’t doing this only out of the kindness of its corporate heart.
“Practically every major industry is desperate to hire more skilled workers,” wrote Rowe and Meta president Dina Powell McCormick in a WSJ post. “At Meta alone, we anticipate needing thousands more workers as we build infrastructure to empower students, families and small-business owners.” Rowe and McCormick also discussed the program on the Fox Business show “Mornings With Maria.”
Here’s why Meta and other big corporations are investing so much in the trades right now.
The trades push
Lowes, BlackRock and Google have also put money toward training new tradespeople — to the collective tune of $365 million. They hope to train around 300,000 new workers by 2036.
The federal government has also put its hat in the ring, releasing a new rule that allows vocational program students to use Pell Grants.
In 2024, McKinsey put out a report on the increasing trades shortage. It found two major problems behind this: an aging workforce and cultural bias against tradesworkers.
The U.S. population is getting older: By 2030, one in five people will be of retirement age, projects the Census Bureau. They also project that, by 2034, older adults will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history.
As the general population gets older, more and more people age out of the physical jobs that dominate the trades. In order for work to continue sustainably, retired workers need to be replaced by younger workers.
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But younger people are being pushed away from the trades as a career. Only 7% of Gen Z parents say they would want their children to pursue a vocational program, per a 2025 report from Jobber. At the same time, 71% of Gen Z say there’s stigma around going to a vocational school.
All of this, along with the trades’ high job churn, means employers are having a tough time hiring enough trades workers.
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Driven by data center construction
What’s behind the latest push to hire trades workers? In short: AI data centers.
“The AI economy, like it or not, is upon us, and the infrastructure that’s being proposed to support it will cost upwards of $10 trillion and require hundreds of thousands of skilled workers,” wrote Rowe, who is also CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, in an X post. “Workers that, for the moment anyway, do not exist.”
He noted in his post that his foundation has helped to train the next generation of skilled workers, “and in the coming months and years, we’ll train thousands more.” But, he added, “there aren’t enough trade schools in the country to meet the current need.”
Around 3,000 data centers are currently planned or under construction in the U.S.; there are around 4,000 data centers currently in operation. The American Edge Project estimates that building all these data centers will create around 4.7 million temporary construction jobs.
Electricians are particularly in demand, since electrical work makes up anywhere from 45% to 70% of the cost of a new data center. No small amount of corporate funding is going toward training electricians; for example, Google invested in the Electrical Training Alliance to help train 100,000 electrical workers in the U.S.
It is, perhaps, ironic that trades jobs — which are frequently deemed “AI-proof” — are earning increased support right now because of AI. But now may be the time to jump in.
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Kit Pulliam is a DC-based financial journalist with over five years of experience writing, editing, and fact-checking financial content.
