Goldman Sachs is warning that artificial intelligence is generating an inflation wave hitting US consumers five times harder than consumers in the rest of the world, while simultaneously threatening to displace roughly 15 million American workers over the next decade.
Goldman Sachs economist Megan Peters calculated that a triple shock from AI-driven memory price surges, software price increases, and electricity cost hikes has already pushed US core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation up by more than 0.2 percentage points year-over-year.
Peters projected the contribution will reach 0.5 percentage points by year-end and noted that the estimate does not account for broader spillover effects, meaning the actual impact could exceed that figure.
Electricity prices jumped 6.9% year-over-year through December 2025, more than double the headline PCE inflation rate of 2.9%, Goldman Sachs analysts stated. Data centers are projected to account for 40% of total electricity demand growth over the next five years, sustaining upward pressure on household energy bills through the end of the decade.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes from its June 16–17, 2026 session explicitly flagged AI-related price pressures as a concern. Goldman Sachs chief US economist David Mericle has pushed his forecast for the next Federal Reserve rate cuts to June and December 2027, pushing back what the bank had previously projected as a 2026 easing cycle and removing a near-term monetary remedy from the table.
The pricing pressure arrives as the US labor market shows concurrent softening that economists are partly attributing to AI. June payrolls totaled just 57,000, less than half of the economist consensus estimate, with April and May revised down by a combined 74,000 jobs.
Joseph Briggs, who co-leads Goldman Sachs Research’s global economics team, said AI is expected to displace about 9% of the US workforce, or roughly 15 million workers, over the coming decade.
