The betrayal behind the data-center backlash: AI promised to break the rules of class but is just rewarding them so far

The pitch was simple: Artificial intelligence would be the great leveler, narrowing the gap between junior and senior, credentialed and non-credentialed, freeing workers into higher-value work. Two years and several trillion dollars later, a different pattern is showing up.

Wall Street’s own economists find that the households most exposed to AI’s risks are also the ones cushioned by stock portfolios large enough to absorb them. It’s welcome news that the AI “jobpocalypse” hasn’t materialized, but the technology appears to be compressing wage growth in a half-decade of inflation above target—a trend that hits hardest on the lowest-paid workers in the most-exposed jobs. Corporate profit margins are near postwar highs not because AI made companies more productive, but because firms used it as cover to raise prices while holding wages flat. And a nationwide backlash against AI’s data centers suggests the public felt what was going on the whole time, not to mention their surging electricity bills.

Taken together, Wall Street research doesn’t describe a technology upending the old order. It describes one being absorbed by it—and rewarding, so far, almost exactly the people who were already winning.

The myth of the vulnerable elite

The loudest version of AI-anxiety held that white-collar professionals—the credentialed, salaried, laptop class—had the most to lose. Assembly-line workers had already lived through automation; now it was the lawyers’ and consultants’ turn. Brookings’ Mark Muro found that 62 of the 100 most AI-exposed counties were primarily urban areas that leaned left in the 2024 election—the white-collar precariat, in other words. Tufts’ Bhaskar Chakravorti called this trend the “Wired Belt,” a 2020s-era echo of the last 50 years of Rust Belt economics.

Morgan Stanley’s economics team tested this fear against the data this month and found it to be half right. High-AI-exposure occupations are concentrated among what the bank calls “CHIC” households: college-educated, high-income, city-dwelling. Nearly 70% of workers in high-exposure jobs hold a bachelor’s degree, versus about 10% in low-exposure work. Median pay in high-exposure occupations is more than double the low-exposure figure: $97,000 versus $46,000. But the investment bank’s team, led by Heather Berger, argued that affluent Americans “may be safer than advertised” after looking through the lens of “elevated equity wealth.”

American household wealth rose roughly $21 trillion between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026, Berger’s team noted, with direct equity holdings driving half of that increase, despite making up only about 30% of total wealth. AI-related stocks are projected to drive........

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