Mike Philbrick

BlackRock just spent $100 million training plumbers and electricians. The initiative is called Future Builders. The goal is to get 50,000 Americans through skilled trades programs over five years, electricians, HVAC techs, ironworkers, pipefitters. There is a real crisis behind it. America is trying to build the most ambitious AI infrastructure in history. Meta alone is spending up to $50 billion on a single data center campus in Louisiana. That construction requires an enormous amount of electrical work. There are not enough electricians to do it and the numbers are stark. About 200,000 electricians are expected to retire over the next decade. We need over 300,000 new ones just to build out the data centers Big Tech is racing to complete. The gap is not closing on its own. Microsoft and Google have both flagged the electrician shortage as a top constraint on U.S. data center expansion. For decades, the U.S. pushed every student toward a four-year degree. Trade enrollment fell, apprenticeship pipelines thinned out, the workforce aged and was never replaced. Now the bill is coming due at the worst possible time. BlackRock also invested over $3 billion in the bonds financing Meta's Hyperion data center, part of a $27 billion private debt deal, the largest ever structured for a single project. It is now funding both the AI buildout and the workers needed to finish it. AI is not automating the electrician. AI is the reason the electrician now has more leverage than ever. Every model, every data center, every autonomous system runs on physical infrastructure that only a credentialed tradesperson can legally build and energize. The technology that was supposed to replace blue-collar work turned out to need blue-collar work more than any other sector right now.

Diversification requires a more thoughtful approach than in the past. 🛠️ With stock/bond correlations shifting, we are looking beyond just bonds, incorporating gold, managed futures, and real assets to build truly resilient portfolios.