JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon put a number on the US shipbuilding deficit Tuesday: 300,000 electricians, welders and other skilled tradespeople over the next five to ten years. Speaking from the Philadelphia Navy Yard, he framed the shortage as both a national security vulnerability and a rare labor-market arbitrage, jobs that pay $80,000 to $100,000 after a year or two of paid apprenticeship, no college degree required. The bank backed the talk with $24 million in loans and philanthropic grants for a new submarine manufacturing facility expected to create 450 permanent jobs and expand training for thousands of prospective welders, electricians and pipefitters.
The yard itself illustrates the distance to be traveled. Now owned by South Korea’s Hanwha, which paid $100 million for it in 2024, the Philadelphia site employs about 16,000 workers and delivers one to one-and-a-half ships a year. Hanwha’s Korean yards turn out roughly one a week. The local apprenticeship program accommodates 20 trainees at a time; Hanwha runs 400 simultaneously in Korea. Dimon said the Philadelphia workforce could double in five years. The math suggests that would still leave it a rounding error against Korean throughput.
The bottleneck extends well beyond Pennsylvania. The Hampton Roads region in Virginia faces an estimated 10,000-worker shortfall that could quadruple to 40,000 by 2030. Huntington Ingalls Industries, the largest US military shipbuilder, spends more than $110 million annually on workforce development. Chief executive Chris Kastner told analysts in May the company hired over 1,600 shipbuilders in the first quarter and graduated nearly 200 apprentices, with its schools now at full enrollment. He called the workforce “stabilizing.” The numbers say it is barely starting.
Pennsylvania senator David McCormick, appearing alongside Dimon, argued that artificial intelligence has made skilled trades the new white-collar hedge, “if you’re an experienced welder or electrician, we can’t get enough of you.” The source of that demand is broadening. Lowe’s has committed $250 million to train 250,000 workers in plumbing, carpentry and electrical work. Meta and BlackRock are also deploying hundreds of millions into trade pipelines, largely to staff the data-center and semiconductor build-out that AI itself requires.
What matters next is whether the apprenticeship infrastructure can scale from dozens to thousands without diluting the proficiency that makes the wages stick. Hanwha’s David Kim has effectively set the benchmark: 400 concurrent trainees, one ship a week. Until US yards approach that cadence, the $100,000 wage is a recruiting pitch, not a market equilibrium.