Saxby Chambliss: America can’t win the AI race without more plumbers and electricians

A $115 million program to train workers for data centers is the clearest signal that the real bottleneck in the race with China isn’t software—it’s labor.

I spent a decade on the Senate Intelligence Committee getting briefed on every way America could lose its technological edge to China. I heard all about stolen intellectual property, compromised supply chains, spies in our research labs, you name it. But in all those years, nobody ever warned me that the thing standing between America and leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) might just be a shortage of plumbers and electricians.

Yet that is where we find ourselves.  

Last week Meta, the National Urban League, the Associated Builders and Contractors and CBRE announced America’s Workforce Academy, a $115 million program that will train Americans for the skilled trades at no cost, pay them while they learn, and guarantee every graduate a job building AI infrastructure – mostly data centers. The first sites open this year in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and Texas, and graduates leave with an industry-recognized credential that travels with them for the rest of their careers.

This is the largest private-sector commitment to the skilled trades with a job guarantee in American history. And it forces a conversation we should have started three years ago. 

We’re about three years into this AI era, and we’ve spent most of that time treating it as a contest of software. It is not. America’s Workforce Academy is the clearest signal yet that the limiting factor in this race is not just algorithms or chips. It is people who can bend conduit and pull fiber.

Think it through: models run on chips, chips run in data centers, and data centers run on electricity moving across a grid built when I was a young man. Every link in that chain is built by welders, electricians, pipefitters, and linemen. China understands this. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is adding power and transmission capacity at a pace we haven’t approached in decades. Until two new reactors finally came online at Plant Vogtle in my home state of Georgia, America had gone some 30 years without building a nuclear reactor from scratch. 

At the heart of the problem is a crippling labor shortage. The construction industry needs nearly 350,000 additional workers this year just to keep pace, the average American welder is now 55 years old, and by 2030 more than two million skilled-trade jobs could sit unfilled. This is a real problem and increasingly a strategic vulnerability.

There is a second lesson, and it cuts close to home for both political parties in Washington. Politicians have spent decades promising and trying to bring manufacturing back. President Trump, to his credit, is making some progress on this front. But times have changed, and we need to rethink what a skilled workforce looks like for the modern era. 

The way I see it, AI infrastructure is the new manufacturing. This is what “Made in America” actually looks like in the 21st Century, and it isn’t an assembly line in 1965. It is a data center campus in rural Louisiana and a power plant in Toledo, Ohio. These are the new factory jobs, and they’re stable, well-paid, impossible to offshore, and open to folks without a college degree.

Finally, the most important thing about this program is not the dollar figure. It is the design. When a participant is accepted, a contractor issues a job offer on the spot, conditioned only on finishing the course. The job comes first and the training follows. This is what serious industrial policy looks like. But this time you have the private sector, not the government, taking the lead. 

That private sector self-interest is why this program will succeed compared to other government-led efforts. It’s not designed to serve every possible need, but is instead tied to real demand and financial stakes will focus it on accountability and getting the right outcomes. 

So what should government do? Speed up the permitting that holds energy projects hostage for years. Make sure trade credentials transfer across state lines. Extend Pell grants to short-term credential programs. And rather than answering with some sweeping federal initiative thrown together for a press release, Washington should find subtle ways to incentivize other companies to follow suit.

The part of South Georgia I called home got electric power because skilled hands strung wire across farm country plenty of people had written off. The same kind of hands will now build the infrastructure that decides whether this century and the internet of the future will be led by free people or by Beijing.

This is a bet on American workers. The rest of the private sector should be fast followers. 

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