Lisa D. Cook wants you to look at your power bill.
Cook, a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, said in a September 28 keynote at Oakland Tech Week that the money pouring into artificial intelligence is no longer staying inside the tech sector. It is showing up in household costs.
Electricity and water prices are each up around 5 percent over the past year, she said. Core goods prices are running over 3 percent this year. Total inflation came in at an estimated 3.8 percent over the 12 months into August, with unemployment at 4.1 percent in August 2026.
“Prices for AI-related goods, such as chips, computers, and software, have surged,” Cook said.
The data centers behind those models need power and water. Those bills do not land on the companies alone. They land in the rates everybody pays.
On jobs, Cook was more careful than the headlines usually are. There is so far “limited evidence that AI is yielding significant changes to the structure of the labor market,” she said, while noting that nearly half of small employer firms now use AI and 71 percent of them report higher productivity.
She also drew a line around what the Fed can actually fix.
“Attempting to fight sector-specific inflation with monetary policy could be a mistake,” she said. “Our tools are too blunt to target narrow sectors.”
Cook is the only Black woman ever to serve on the Federal Reserve Board. She was confirmed in 2022. The address was cohosted by the Kapor Center, which has spent years arguing that who builds technology decides who it costs.
Here is the practical read. Black women are more likely to head households where a utility increase is not an annoyance but a decision about what else goes unpaid that month. When the AI boom gets discussed, it is usually in the language of stock prices and job displacement. Cook put it in the language of a monthly statement.
She also said the pressure is not done, pointing to the build-out plus higher oil prices and supply chain disruption tied to conflict in the Middle East.
Watch the utility line, not the ticker.
