A 5-week course and a guaranteed job: Meta commits $115 million to solve the skilled-trades shortage stalling its AI build-out

The investment is part of the company’s larger plan to spend $600 billion on its U.S. data center build-out by 2028.

Trade jobs are the future, and Meta knows it. The company is launching an initiative called America’s Workforce Academy to train data center technicians in partnership with commercial real estate giant CBRE; Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction trade association; and civil rights organization National Urban League. 

Meta is committing $115 million this year to provide free training and a guaranteed job upon the program’s completion. The company is covering all the costs for the five-week program, from tuition to housing to a daily training stipend. No prior experience is necessary, and the training is open to everyone from recent grads to people making a career pivot. 

“America’s Workforce Academy is our commitment to building that workforce with the same ambition and long-term thinking we bring to the technology itself,” said Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of data centers. “America needs hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople—electricians, mechanics, fiber technicians, and more—and this program creates clear, accessible pathways into those careers.”

The initiative comes as Americans debate the increasingly unpredictable value of a four-year college degree and uncertainty over the future of white-collar work. Blue-collar trade jobs in construction, HVAC, and electrical work are in much higher demand than the national average. 

The academy’s graduates will earn an industry-recognized National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) credential and an America’s Workforce Certificate. The average salary for a data center technician is $54,031, according to ZipRecruiter. Meta did not respond to Fortune’s questions about how many people the academy plans to train or the salary ranges of the guaranteed positions with contractors building out Meta’s data network. 

Even though seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers near where they live, Meta is pushing ahead with its plan to invest $600 billion in U.S. data center development by 2028. At the same time, the company has laid off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, and moved another 7,000 staffers to AI-focused roles as part of a major restructuring. 

Meta currently operates or is building 27 data centers. The program will be piloted in Baton Rouge, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Houston. Richland Parish in Louisiana is home to the company’s largest data center campus, and thousands of temporary workers have moved to the town to build out the center. A small group of 500 is expected to remain in permanent roles at the 2,250-acre campus. The $27 billion development has received a mixed response from the local community, Fortune previously reported. The temporary economic boom has helped local businesses, but residents fear higher rent and negative environmental impacts. 

“The AI revolution is bringing change but also historic opportunities. Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won World War II,” Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman, said in a statement. “Now a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age.”

The initiative builds upon the LevelUp fiber technician training program that Meta and CBRE announced in April. Over four weeks, participants will receive free training. The program, which received 35,000 applications for 1,000 openings in the first seven days, is expected to start this summer. The average salary nationwide for a fiber technician is $57,818, according to ZipRecruiter. About 180,000 additional fiber construction and technical workers are needed in the next 10 years to meet the demand for planned federal and state projects, according to the Fiber Broadband Association. 

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta also pledged $50 million to Sacramento State in January to build state-of-the-art STEM facilities and an AI center, which Gov. Gavin Newsom said will strengthen the region’s tech talent pipeline.

Aligned with the America First agenda

The academy is strongly aligned with President Donald Trump’s America First agenda, which aims to fuel a “blue-collar resurgence.” The administration wants to train more than a million registered apprentices and has invested more than $229 million in grants to support that goal. Its focus is singularly on American workers.  

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the president have been in conversation about the company’s data center build-out. In January, Trump shared at the World Economic Forum meeting that Zuckerberg had showed him a map of a data center campus, potentially Richland Parish, overlaid on a map of Manhattan. 

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ It was miles long, miles wide, and very high. It literally covered most of the island,” Trump said. 

The CEO has maintained a close relationship with Trump as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He also recently lobbied the president to postpone an executive order on AI regulation. Weeks later, Trump signed a version of the order with weaker government oversight. Zuckerberg has defended his relationship with Trump, saying that it is “fundamental” for Meta to have a good relationship with the U.S. government. 

The company has also argued that training Americans in skilled trades is essential to competing with China’s AI capacity. 

“If the country, if America doesn’t come together and ensure that we frankly treat these workers as the American heroes that they are, without them, we can’t compete with China,” Powell McCormick said on Fox News on Tuesday. Meta did not say in the release whether the program is limited to American citizens but has highlighted the role of “American workers.”  

The company is far from the only one investing in trade jobs. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is investing $100 million to train 50,000 plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians over the next five years. 

“America needs an estimated $10 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2033 to modernize aging systems and build new energy, digital, and AI infrastructure,” CEO Larry Fink said in March. “Capital alone is not enough—people are central to building our nation’s future.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com