(Bloomberg) — Blackstone Inc. President Jon Gray said the boom in artificial intelligence will lead to a surge in blue-collar employment as asset managers like his shell out billions on data centers and other infrastructure.
For instance, QTS — a data-center operator backed by Blackstone — will have 40,000 people working on job sites around the country by the end of the year, Gray said. That’s up from 10,000 just one year ago.
“This is a huge boom in blue collar employment, certainly over the next 5 years,” Gray said during a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference. “Where these jobs are, it may change — the middle of the country is where the bulk of this physical investment is happening.”
Gray’s comments come as the rapid build out of AI infrastructure around the country has sparked fears that the technology could one day replace vast swaths of jobs. A recent report from Boston Consulting Group found that AI could cause as much as 15% of jobs to be eliminated in the next five years — though it said a far greater portion will only be reshaped by the technology.
Franklin Resources Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jenny Johnson also weighed in on the debate, arguing that new jobs could be created as more people get their hands AI and come up with use cases.
“None of us are that good at using these tools yet,” she said on the same panel. “Once you get those tools in people’s hands, we’re going to find there’s massive more things that we never understood we needed that we’re suddenly not going to live without.”
