One good bet for a young person wondering what industry to enter
October 9, 2025
By Matthew Pietz
This article was written and edited without the use of AI.
These days, one question is prevalent on the minds not just of parents, but anyone concerned about the post-AI world: What will today’s young people do for work tomorrow?
In a time of uncertainty, one industry looks particularly poised for growth.
Whether humans and AI converge or remain separate; whether it turns out we’re an AI investment bubble right now, or stocks continue to rise; whether tech companies achieve massive political power as democracy decays, or advanced tech helps us achieve a near-utopia, one thing is almost certain: We’re going to have more tech in the world, and a lot of work is needed to build and manage it.
Jobs related to the creation and leadership of tech infrastructure, which we’ll define for this article as energy supply, data centers, chip manufacturing, and cybersecurity, are going to see significant growth in the coming years. (AI engineering is also obviously a growth field, but this is the tech itself, and covered well enough elsewhere).
Let’s take them one by one.
Energy supply. We’ll need a lot more electricity in the next decade—at least 13% more than we have now, according to the IEA (though you may be surprised to learn data centers by no means the biggest driver, as shown below). Renewables are expected to grow the fastest. Specialists in building power stations and transmission lines, windmills, solar panels, hydropower systems, and batteries will be in high demand. Fossil fuels remain core, naturally, but are projected to lose market share. Note that given what AI can and can’t do, electricians and physical builders of this infrastructure may have more job security than engineers, especially at the entry level young people will be applying for.
Source: Nature, March 17 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00616-z
Data Centers. McKinsey estimates that $6.7 trillion will be spent on the building of data centers between now and 2030. As with the energy supply, these facilities will require huge numbers of construction workers, electricians, and production and project managers. On the non-profit side, there may be funding opportunities to advocate for preventing environmental and community harm in this rush to build on such a massive scale.
Chip Manufacturing. Chris Miller’s excellent book Chip War shows how the global supply chain for the top microchips essential to our devices, certainly including AI data centers, all but hinges on a single producer in Taiwan. The immense complexity of making cutting-edge chips means it’s not easy to build a competing foundry, though many have tried. Still, as all kinds of tech use increases, expect more actors—start-ups, existing tech titans, and governments—to try to enter this space. Here, too, physical work is more protected (so is leadership, but those jobs are hard for young people to get). People who know how to do lithography, etching, silicon wafer fabrication, and how to manage the power, water and gas needs of chip plants may do well.
Cybersecurity. All of the above are going to need security systems and people to run them. In fact, the protection of the power grid, data centers and chip plants may increasingly be considered not just economic priorities but national security concerns. We also predict an innate preference for ‘humans in the loop’ in cybersecurity, more than in certain other fields. People will want the reassurance that a human is looking after the interests of other humans, even if much of the overall security regime is delegated to AI.
Finally, a bit of broader advice: as we all know, entry-level, white-collar jobs are endangered by AI. If a young person wants to go into a nonmanual field, they may do better to join a small company or start-up, where they can more quickly get management and leadership roles that are still impossible to automate. A large, traditional company is less likely to give an inexperienced new hire a job that is AI-proof. And, who knows, at a groundbreaking startup a young person may have a chance to help shape the direction our future takes.
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