USA – The US economy currently depends on immense investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI)according to various macroeconomic analyzes of a phenomenon that is increasingly worrying due to doubts about its ability to generate returns.
Recently, the Bank of America (BoA) issued a report in which it calculated that in the second quarter of the year, investments in AI, “especially in computer software and equipment,” contributed up to 1.3 percentage points to the growth of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which would represent around half of wealth creation.
The figure confirms that AI has become one of the main drivers of the US economy to the point of offsetting the negative effect of high interest rates.
BNP Paribas chief US economist James Egelhof put it succinctly and brutally this month: “AI has kept the economy from entering a recession.”
That opinion is shared by analysts from other financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank.
In the first quarter of 2025, US GDP saw a small drop, but in the second it recovered with 3.8% growth, according to BoA data.
“One of the main reasons for the resilience of growth to date is the investment that is being directed into technology and AI-related categories,” the report noted.
According to the Goldman Sachs firm, technology giants Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon now represent more than 25% of all capital investment (capex) made by companies in the S&P 500, the main US stock index.
And the investment of these companies is growing at an annual rate of 75%.
Research from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) noted in August that of 300 public AI initiatives it studied, 95% did not obtain any return on their investments in AI.
It is reports like this that cause some analysts to compare today’s situation with the technology bubble of 2000 that wiped more than $5 trillion from the stock markets.
BoA also said that the investment trend accelerated in the third quarter and that, in September alone, technology spending by small businesses increased 6.9% year-on-year, especially in the manufacturing and construction sectors.
One of the negative consequences of this increase in investments is the upward pressure on energy prices, caused by the rise of data centers, a basic piece for AI and which according to Pew Research consume around 4% of all the country’s electricity. Some megacenters in Virginia (where the so-called ‘Data Center Alley’ is located) use the equivalent of the electricity consumption of an entire city.
But, for now, AI is not destroying jobs, according to official US data and in fact, BoA said, in sectors such as finance or technology it is contributing to job growth.
The question for analysts like Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos is what will happen to the US economy once these giant investments in AI begin to moderate.
“The bad news is that, for the technological cycle to continue contributing to GDP growth, capital investments need to remain exponential, something highly unlikely,” Saravelos wrote in a note to investors.