Concrete, GPUs, and Careers: What the AI Surge Really Looks Like

Let’s get something straight: AI isn’t just some ominous cloud of automation hanging over our heads, quietly plotting to take every human job and laugh in binary. That narrative is tired. The reality? AI is spawning a whole new economy, and it’s hungry for talent.

Case in point:

Crusoe just announced the expansion of its Abilene AI campus to a jaw-dropping 1.2GW.

We’re talking about:

• $15 billion in capital investment

• 6 new buildings housing up to 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs each

• 5,000 construction jobs created for this phase alone

• A projected $1B+ economic impact over 20 years; and that’s just from the first two buildings

So, while some are fretting over prompt engineering replacing project managers, the real story is this:

AI is creating jobs that didn’t exist five years ago, and scaling up existing ones to unprecedented levels.

What Kind of Jobs Are We Actually Talking About?

We’re not just hiring AI whisperers with PhDs and VC-fueled egos. We’re hiring:

People Who Build Stuff

• Electricians

• Civil engineers

• HVAC and cooling techs (yes, even the nerdy stuff like zero-evaporation liquid cooling)

• Construction crews and safety officers

People Who Run the Machines

• Data center techs

• Network engineers

• GPU admins

• Platform engineers for hyperscale workloads

People Who Keep It Safe

• Cybersecurity professionals

• SOC analysts

• Physical security teams (because yes, someone still needs to guard the literal servers)

  
  

People Who Keep It Green

• Environmental consultants

• Liquid cooling specialists

• Sustainability managers

People Who Train the Rest

• Internal L&D leads

• Technical instructors

• HR folks who build career paths that don’t involve leaving people behind

“So… How Do Companies Prepare Their People for This?”

Glad you asked. Here’s the cheat sheet:

1. Assess what you’ve got.

Run a skills audit. Who can pivot into AI infra-adjacent work with training? You might already have future GPU admins disguised as sysadmins or cloud engineers.

2. Cross-train like your future depends on it.

Because it does. Help your HVAC techs learn immersion cooling. Upskill cloud ops into ML workflows. Don’t reinvent, retrain.

3. Partner with the right educators.

NVIDIA offers official training. Coursera, DeepLearning.AI, and Databricks are building short-form, high-impact programs tailored to this wave of tech.

4. Hire for grit, train for skill.

A lot of what’s coming won’t show up in resumes just yet. Hire people with hands-on experience, curiosity, and the drive to learn. Then get them GPU-ready.

5. Create internal learning loops.

Leverage the nerds on your team. Host sessions. Share context. Normalize “learning while doing”, that's how everyone will keep up with the speed of AI infra evolution.

From Automation Panic to Infrastructure Boom

This isn’t a job apocalypse. It’s a massive industrial shift. And, if you’re in HR, or leadership, this is your moment to reimagine workforce planning. There’s a lot of work ahead. It just looks a little different than it did yesterday.

The AI boom isn’t just happening in the cloud. It’s pouring concrete in a town near you. It’s wiring GPUs by the tens of thousands. And it’s hiring like hell.

Want help building a workforce that’s ready for this future?

At Roire HR, we specialize in workforce design, talent upskilling, and helping companies scale with clarity, even in chaos. Let’s talk. Before the GPUs beat you to it.