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

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