Forget the AI labs: This is where hiring is actually booming
Ask most people where the hiring boom is right now, and you'll likely get the same answer: a handful of AI labs in San Francisco. While that is definitely true, the fastest-growing job markets aren’t just AI labs. They're in the industries around them that are getting reshaped by the AI boom.
Below, based on analysis of its real-time compensation database of more than 9,000 companies, Pave explains where headcount is actually accelerating.
Physical AI and Robotics
While software-only AI hiring gets most of the attention, companies building physical AI and robotics (the hardware side of the AI boom) have been adding headcount at a pace that consistently outruns the rest of the tech sector. This one makes sense. A software AI company can grow revenue without significantly growing its team. A robotics company can't do the same, since every new product or operation requires more engineers, manufacturing, and people in the field.
Headcount at robotics and physical AI companies is up 210% since mid-2024. The rest of tech grew 68% over the same stretch. That's roughly three times. This isn't a recent spike, either. The gap between robotics hiring and general tech hiring has been widening steadily for well over a year, suggesting sustained demand rather than a short-term hiring sprint.
Aerospace and defense
Hiring in aerospace and defense doesn't move in a straight line. Hiring here comes in fits and starts as it’s largely driven by securing contracts. But zoom out, and the trajectory is steep: Headcount is up 158% since mid-2024, more than double the rest of technology.
While U.S. universities produce around 140,000 engineering graduates each year, Manpower estimates that only about 60% of those grads are qualified for aerospace roles upon graduation. Roles that need a security clearance or specialized technical training are especially tough to fill. Venture capital also plays a big part here: Andreessen Horowitz alone put more than $1 billion into its American Dynamism fund, which backs companies building drones, autonomous boats, and missiles.
The roles seeing the most action include supply chain and procurement, general software engineering, security and government/defense clearance roles, embedded and firmware engineering, and forward-deployed or field engineering.
Data centers and clean energy
If aerospace and defense hiring is uneven, the data centers and clean energy sector is the opposite: Its hiring curve has been getting steeper, especially in the past several months. The companies building and powering AI infrastructure have the steepest hiring curve of the group, with headcount up 218% since mid-2024.
It's not a coincidence. Big tech has spent the past two years signing nuclear power deals to keep data centers running, including Microsoft's agreement to restart Three Mile Island.
Most of the jobs in this sector have nothing to do with building models and everything to do with building and running the physical infrastructure underneath them: project managers, warehouse associates, project engineers, production supervisors, and quality engineers.
Healthcare
Headcount in healthcare is up 188% since mid-2024, nearly triple the broader tech benchmark. Most of that growth shows up in health tech, biotech, and pharma companies rather than traditional hospital systems. Drug discovery, digital health, and health data companies are hiring aggressively right now.
Pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly have been inking dozens of AI drug-discovery partnerships, so the increase in hiring in this sector makes sense.
Venture capital and private equity
The biggest hiring growth isn't in tech at all. Based on the analysis, VC and PE firms grew headcount 381% since mid-2024. That's more than five times the rest of tech, and the largest jump of any industry in the analysis.
VC and PE firms aren't usually a hiring-boom story; they're lean by design. One plausible explanation is that the capital pouring into AI has to be deployed and managed by someone, and firms are staffing up to do so.
Taken together, these five sectors make one thing pretty clear: the AI hiring story isn't really about who's building the models. It's about everyone else: the industries building around AI, powering it, funding it, or just growing on their own timeline regardless of what's happening in San Francisco.
This story was produced by Pave and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
