In the age of the AI boom, Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and several other tech companies spent billions in investment in AI last year.
AI Added “Zero” To US Economic Growth
They are expected to spend even more, roughly $700 billion in the coming future on dozens of new data centers to train and run their advanced models.
Due to this spending frenzy, the Wall Street kept buzzing and fueled a narrative that all this investment is helping prop up and even grow the U.S. economy.
President Donald Trump has cited that argument as a reason the industry should not face state-level regulations.
Highlighting his thoughts on the industry should not face state-level regulations, President Donald Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, “Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World — But overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Growth Engine,” in November.
Further adding, “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes.”
This story was given credibility by some prominent economists with their analysis.
Rethinking On AI Narrative
The investments in information processing equipment and software accounted for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of the year, said Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor, said in a post on X.
Similar to this, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated that
AI-related investments made up 39% of GDP growth in the third quarter of 2025.
Although, the picture is changing now as some Wall Street analysts are starting to rethink this narrative.
Talking on the topic on Monday, Goldman Sachs analyst, Joseph Briggs said, “It was a very intuitive story. That may have prevented or limited the need to actually dig deeper into what was happening.”
AI investment spending has had “basically zero” contribution to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025, said Briggs’ colleague, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius, said in an interview with the Atlantic Council.
Moving ahead, Hatzius said, “We don’t actually view AI investment as strongly growth positive,” “I think there’s a lot of misreporting, actually, of the impact AI investment had on the U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and it’s much smaller than is often perceived.”
One major reason is that much of the equipment powering AI is imported, Hatzius said.
It appears that the U.S. companies are spending billions, importing chips and hardware to offset those investments in GDP calculations.
According to Hatzius, “A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to the U.S. GDP.”
Besides this, there is no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth so far.
In the meantime, many business leaders are of the opinion that AI hasn’t significantly improved productivity.
This is significant as a recent survey of nearly 6,000 executives in the U.S., Europe, and Australia found that despite 70% of firms actively using AI, about 80% reported no impact on employment or productivity.