Blackstone COO Jon Gray predicts ‘huge boom’ in blue-collar jobs—his own data center company is hiring 30,000 new roles

As generative AI threatens to upend the white-collar workforce, it’s creating a surge of opportunity in one corner of the labor market: the skilled trades.

That’s at least according to Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer at Blackstone—the biggest publicly-traded alternative asset manager—who predicted a “huge boom in blue-collar employment certainly over the next five years.”

Speaking at the Milken Institute last week, Gray pointed to QTS, one of Blackstone’s portfolio companies, which operates or is developing more than 75 data centers worldwide. 

A year ago, roughly 10,000 workers were on QTS job sites. By year’s end, that number is set to quadruple to 40,000—a 300% jump.

“Between the energy, the physical infrastructure, the data centers, the reindustrialization—something very powerful [is] happening,” Gray said.

The boom is being fueled by a massive wave of AI infrastructure investment. According to McKinsey, global spending on data centers could reach $7 trillion by 2030,........

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