Exclusive: Goolsbee says AI is 'not far' from overheating the economy

Austan Goolsbee is starting to sound less like a central banker watching one hot sector and more like someone staring at a whole economy getting shoved around by it. In an exclusive interview with Fortune’s Ellie Pringle, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago president said the rush to build AI data centers could be pushing prices and labor costs up in ways that spill beyond tech itself.

His concern is simple enough: the demand for the physical stuff behind AI is pulling money, workers, and materials away from other projects. He pointed to construction crews that are already too expensive to hire and HVAC workers who are hard to find. In places he’s visiting in the Seventh District, companies are saying they’re scaling back plans because the resources they need are being swallowed by data center work.

Goolsbee drew a line between a sector swap and something bigger. One is AI eating into other industries. The other is the whole economy running too hot. Right now, he thinks it still looks more like the first. But he added that the U.S. is “not far” from crossing into the second.

That matters because AI spending is no longer a side plot. Elsewhere in the same Fortune roundup, the buildout is described as big enough to boost jobs, GDP growth, and stock valuations outside tech. So the Fed is left with a familiar headache: a boom that helps the numbers on one page while making life more expensive on another.

Goolsbee’s warning is the right one to watch. AI hype is usually sold as software magic, but the inflation problem comes from very unsexy things like labor, concrete, electricity, and HVAC. The people cheering the boom tend to forget that every “revolution” still needs a builder’s truck.