Artificial Intelligence and the US Economy: An Accounting Perspective on Investment and Production

TL;DR

This paper examines how AI investment impacts the US economy by analyzing national accounts, emphasizing data centers' role, and assessing AI's contribution to demand and GDP growth amid macroeconomic risks.

Contribution

It introduces a macro-accounting framework for AI's economic footprint, highlighting data centers' importance and quantifying AI's potential GDP contribution.

Findings

AI data centers are crucial for meeting global AI service demand.

AI-related capital expenditure significantly boosts aggregate demand.

AI's contribution to GDP is limited by high import content but could grow substantially.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved to the center of policy, market, and academic debates, but its macroeconomic footprint is still only partly understood. This paper provides an overview on how the current AI wave is captured in US national accounts, combining a simple macro-accounting framework with a stylized description of the AI production process. We highlight the crucial role played by data centers, which constitute the backbone of the AI ecosystem and have attracted formidable investment in 2025, as they are indispensable for meeting the rapidly increasing worldwide demand for AI services. We document that the boom in IT and AI-related capital expenditure in the first three quarters of the year has given an outsized boost to aggregate demand, while its contribution to GDP growth is smaller once the high import content of AI hardware is netted out. Furthermore, simple calculations suggest that, at current utilization rates and pricing, the production of services originating in new AI data centers could contribute to GDP over the turn of the next quarters on a scale comparable to that of investment spending to date. Short reinvestment cycles and uncertainty about future AI demand, while not currently acting as a macroeconomic drag, can nevertheless fuel macroeconomic risks over the medium term.