America's economy grew 1.5% last quarter. Strip out the AI buildout and it grew 0.2%.
Quarterly annualised growth of US real GDP, split into the contribution of the AI buildout (business investment in computer equipment, software, and research and development) and everything else. Construction of the data centre buildings is not even counted here; adding it would tilt the split further.
- Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta plan to spend about $700bn between them this year on chips, servers and data centres, nearly double what they spent last year. In the GDP accounts that arrives as business investment in computers, software and research.
- The boom is now big enough to outweigh the whole consumer: in the first half of 2025 these investment categories added more to growth than the spending of every American household combined, despite being about a twentieth of the economy against the consumer's two thirds. It happened again in the first quarter of 2026.
- Everything else has faded as the boom accelerated. High interest rates, a frozen jobs market and new tariffs have cut growth outside the AI categories from about 3% in 2023 to roughly a quarter of one percent over the past three quarters.
Growth in the world's largest economy now rests on one bet. As long as a few technology firms keep spending, the headline numbers hold up; the moment they pause, there is almost nothing underneath. It has happened before: telecom investment carried growth in 2000, the spending stopped in 2001, and a recession followed. And this chart only counts the building of AI. The productivity payoff from using it, the thing that would justify the whole boom, has not shown up in the numbers yet.