Where's the concern about robots and AI?

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The pricing pressures of these and other components have been most evident at the producer level. The Producer Price Index chart semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing industry looks like a hockey stick.


As of June, that category’s wholesale prices were up 26% from a year ago – a stark shift from June 2025 when prices were falling 0.8% on an annual basis, PPI data shows.


“Why this matters for the end consumer is, at the end of the day, our laptops, computers, iPhones, iPads all have some sort of memory chip embedded in that hardware, and those chips have become quite expensive,” she said.

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Late last month, Apple hiked the prices for some of its most popular products by roughly 20%. In a statement, the company noted that AI data centers created an “extraordinary surge” in demand for memory and storage.


Sony upped the price of its PlayStation console earlier this year, and Microsoft last month raised the price of its Xbox consoles by about 25% for similar reasons.


“The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” Microsoft wrote in a statement.

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Data centers also are impacting the supply of other key construction inputs such as copper and electrical wiring, as well as workers.

“If you’re looking for data that was conclusive (about AI’s effect on the economy and inflation), albeit a bit more subtle, you would look and see whether wages in construction were going up more than wages in the rest of the economy,” said Thierry Wizman, Global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie Group.

“Because if in fact there is upward pressure, straining resources of the economy because of the AI data center buildout, you would see it in wages as well – specifically in the wages of labor that would be working these projects,” he added.

So far, the available national-level wage data is showing a “robust divergence” between the construction sector and the aggregate, he noted.

Regional data could prove even more telling, he said, noting the importance of tracking construction wages in areas with a high concentration of data centers. (That will take more patience, however, as that more localized data is lagged due to collection and modeling needs).

“We’re having a problem with housing in the country these days; people talk about it as being unaffordable,” Wizman said. “It could be the case that the fact wages in construction have been rising a lot is putting upward pressure on houses as well.”