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Ask most people where the hiring boom is right now and you'll 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 quietly reshaped by the AI boom.
Here's where headcount is actually accelerating.
Physical AI & 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 growing its team much. A robotics company can't 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 3x. 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, which points to sustained demand rather than a short-term hiring sprint.
Aerospace & 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, and by a wide margin: 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 (which we’ll dive into more later in this piece) also plays a big part here: a16z 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: 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 & Clean energy
If aerospace and defense is uneven, this sector is the opposite: a hiring curve that 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: 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 these jobs 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 here 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. That puts healthcare closer to the AI story than it looks, a bit different to how it is traditionally framed as a steady, recession-proof sector. 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 it makes sense that this is where much of that hiring is landing.
Venture Capital & Private Equity
The biggest number in this whole piece isn't in tech at all.VC and PE firms grew headcount 381% since mid-2024. That's more than 5x the rest of tech, and the largest jump of any industry we looked at.
VC and PE firms aren't usually a hiring-boom story; they're lean by design. One plausible read: the capital pouring into AI has to be deployed and managed by someone, and firms are staffing up to do it.
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.
If you want to see which specific roles are gaining ground in real time, Pave tracks this in our Hot Jobs Index.
Rithika is a data scientist at Pave focused on compensation insights, analytics, data-storytelling, and community. Before Pave, she worked at Karat Financial building a credit card product and launching a personal finance tool for content creators.
