this dream people have of there being a long term career in being IC an with a narrow technical engineering responsibility is not real regardless of industry
ai lab, datacenter, factory, whatever. it doesn't matter. you're not getting promotions year over year for building a cooling system or model architecture
having the idea for the cooling system, planning it, acquiring budget/headcount, delivering the system, & having customers buy it is what gets the big bucks
laser focus on evaluating whether or not you're improving at delivering outcomes
if you're not doing that at your place of work today then you're not going to have career progression in 5yrs regardless
join an ai lab, saas, cooling company, whatever. just make the number go up & you're going to be fine. embrace complexity
If I was a recent EE graduate I would probably go into power.
I think the smartest career move you can do right now is do 2-3 years and a big data center power company like Eaton, Schneider Electric, or Flex learn the problem space and what customers want and start your own company.
It isn’t as sexy as “AI” or “chip design” but we probably get more value out of new power architectures than chip design at this point.