Ford’s Jim Farley has long warned that America is losing its ‘vital economy’ as AI eats up jobs. Goldman Sachs has receipts | Good luck

It is an agreement between two different titans of the Fortune 500: Ford CEO Jim Farley, who has spent years lamenting the crisis in what he calls the “essential economy,” and Goldman Sachs, which puts hard numbers on the work that threatens to slow down the AI ​​buildout on Wall Street that has been ongoing.

Farley has been the company’s most persistent voice warning that the US is entering a labor crisis. What he calls the vital economy, the blue-collar sectors that make things “managed, built, or repaired,” represent $12 trillion in US GDP, according to the Aspen Institute. But for a long time it is understaffed and undervalued. The country already has 600,000 factory workers and 500,000 construction workers, Farley wrote in a LinkedIn post last June. And he sees the situation getting worse, not better.

“I think the goal is there, but nothing can replace the passion,” Farley said Axios in September 2025. “How can we rebuild all these things if we don’t have people working there?”

Ironically, Farley says, it is technology that is disrupting white-collar jobs that is causing a huge wave of demand for blue-collar workers that America has neglected. AI could wipe out half of all white-collar jobs in the United States within a decade, he warned at the Aspen Conference of Ideas last year — displacing high-tech fields like software and clerical work. Meanwhile, the skilled tradespeople needed to build the data centers that will run those AI systems are not available in sufficient numbers.

This force suggests an unstable loop. AI is eliminating the early, white-collar jobs that have long attracted young workers to tech jobs — potentially shrinking the talent pool that, through retraining, can feed business pipelines. Technology simultaneously creates a need for infrastructure and undermines the ability of workers to meet it.

“There’s more than one path to the American Dream, but our entire education system is focused on a four-year degree,” Farley said in Aspen. Tech company hiring is down 50% since 2019. Is that where we want all our kids to go?”

Now Goldman Sachs has calculated exactly how strong the disruption is.

In a Goldman Sachs Exchanges podcast, Brian Singer, head of GS Sustain, warned that the construction of AI infrastructure will require 500,000 new US jobs to build and power data centers – about 300,000 to provide electricity and another 200,000 for grid transmission and distribution work. The last one is the sticking point. GS Sustain is Goldman Sachs Research’s sustainability-focused initiative, which provides research and data tools that examine how the design, management and implementation of sustainability topics affect sustainable investments and broader cash flows.

“Where we are most concerned is the transmission and distribution side,” said Singer, “because there are electricians who need four years of experience.” The US currently has about 45,000 active students, Singer noted — a number that needs to rise by 20,000 to 25,000 to keep up with projected demand.

Regional differences

Those national figures, however, may mask an even worse environmental crisis. The construction of the data center is concentrated in several markets: Virginia-it shoulders about 70% of the world’s internet traffic and has about 35 GW in development-along with the Phoenix metro of Texas and Arizona, which ranks third in the country for new capacity.

Matt Landek, president of the global data center division at JLL, warned earlier this year that secondary markets “often lack the specialized construction expertise, skilled workers, and operational support tools that primary markets provide,” meaning that labor attrition follows the building wherever it goes. When many high-profile companies go bankrupt in one place, talent pools are depleted within months—forcing contractors to import workers. In Northern Virginia, wage pressure is now measurable: Traveling electricians now earn over $120,000 annually, and Microsoft has switched to hiring electricians traveling from 75 miles away.

Singer established labor pressure as the most pressing concern of his firm’s “6 Ps”, a framework of factors that can drive or derail the demand for AI power, including proliferation, production, price, strategy, parts and people. Of the six, he said, “people” keep him up late at night.

Goldman’s analysis reaches the same conclusion that Farley reached about the Detroit windshield: that America’s lunar AI is operating on a broken foundation. The capital of the hyperscaler in the world is not able to pull out a license holder out of thin air (Goldman estimates that the combined funds have increased by more than $ 300 billion for 2026 and 2027). And the brutal numbers of the AI ​​era mean that the technology that destroys one worker depends on another worker that America has spent decades failing to build.

Farley’s reforms are administrative: more investment in vocational education, expanding the apprenticeship pipeline, and addressing the cultural and prestige gap between four-year degrees and business careers.

“On the surface, this looks like a human problem,” he said Axios. But in reality it is not that simple. It’s a problem of awareness. It is a social problem.

Goldman’s Singer puts it more bluntly: Without the workers to build the network, data centers don’t get built — and the AI ​​revolution stops the transmission line.

For this story, Good luck Journalists have used artificial intelligence as an investigative tool. The editor has verified the accuracy of the content before publishing.