Jensen Huang's Blue-Collar Millionaire Prediction Lifted Quanta Services' Backlog to $48 Billion
Jensen Huang says the AI bottleneck isn't chips, it's skilled workers, and one infrastructure company may be perfectly positioned to profit.
Overview
For a while now, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang has been making a point that runs counter to the usual AI hype. The bottleneck in building out artificial intelligence, he argues, isn't just chips, it's the electricians, pipefitters, and grid crews needed to raise the data centers, fabs, and power lines those chips depend on. He's gone so far as to suggest skilled tradespeople could become a new class of high earners. That thesis has a very real corporate beneficiary, and its backlog just told the story.
Quanta Services (NYSE: PWR) is a specialty contractor that strings transmission lines, builds substations, and wires interconnections that enable a hyperscaler to power a new campus. When Quanta reported earlier this year, its total backlog, essentially the work already signed and waiting to be done, reached a record of $48.5 billion. Management frames the longer-term opportunity as a $2.4 trillion addressable market through 2030, driven by aging grids, new power generation, and the enormous electricity loads that AI facilities represent.
Details
Here's the angle I find more interesting than the backlog figure itself. If labor is the true constraint on the AI build-out, then the company that controls its own labor supply holds a quiet advantage. Quanta does exactly that. It owns Northwest Lineman College, which trains thousands of pre-apprentices, apprentices, and journey-level line workers every year, and it runs its own advanced training centers to develop crews across its service lines.
Source
Originally published at www.fool.com.