Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is launching a free training program to prepare Americans for skilled trade jobs building the company’s rapidly expanding network of data centers. According to the company, participants who successfully complete the program will have a guaranteed job in the trades.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Meta has announced the creation of “America’s Workforce Academy,” designed to train workers in the skilled trades needed to construct its massive data center facilities across the United States.
The program, developed in partnership with commercial real estate firm CBRE and the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group, will be free for participants and comes with a guaranteed job placement at a Meta data-center construction site upon completion. Meta has committed $115 million to fund the initiative this year, with pilot programs launching in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and Texas. Interested parties can learn more about the application process here.
In a statement to Breitbart News, Meta President and Vice-Chairman Dina Powell McCormick said: “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. Now a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age.”
The company’s push into workforce development comes as skilled trade workers have become increasingly scarce and sought-after commodities in the American labor market. The construction industry faces particularly acute pressure, with Associated Builders and Contractors estimating that approximately 349,000 net new workers must be added this year alone simply to meet existing demand.
The surge in data center construction has been a primary driver of this demand. Facilities capable of powering artificial intelligence workloads require extensive electrical infrastructure and sophisticated heating-and-cooling systems, creating particularly strong demand for electricians and HVAC technicians. Analysis by labor market research firm Lightcast found that data center-related construction job postings have roughly doubled over the past two years.
Meta has already seen strong interest in its trade-focused training efforts. In April, the company announced a fiber-installation training program to prepare workers for fiber technician positions. That program attracted 35,000 applications within its first seven days, according to the company.
Commenting on Meta’s initiative, Mike Rowe, CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, said: “Closing America’s skills gap requires us to not only make a more persuasive case for the skilled trades in general, it requires us to completely rethink the way we train the next generation of skilled workers. America’s Workforce Academy does both. Workers are actually paid to learn. There is zero cost to them, no college debt and a fast certification, with a guaranteed job on the other end. This is an important step in the right direction, and one that I hope other companies will be inspired to take.”
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.