Goldman Sachs: AI investment is crowding out some capital expenditures, but it is not enough to reshape the U.S. macroeconomic cycle.

Goldman Sachs notes two overinterpretations emerging in the market regarding the macro impact of AI capital expenditure: on one hand, investors are underestimating AI investment’s boost to the tech, energy and data center sectors; on the other, they are overstating the AI boom’s impact on the overall U.S. economy and investment in other industries. Goldman Sachs economists Jessica Rindels and David Mericle project in a new report that AI-related investment could reach roughly $600 billion this year, equivalent to about 2% of U.S. GDP, 10% of corporate fixed investment, and 15% of equipment investment. This size is enough to explain why AI infrastructure remains one of the most important trading themes in U.S. stocks, and why Nvidia, cloud providers, data centers, power equipment and the semiconductor chain continue to attract capital. However, Goldman Sachs also warns that AI investment’s direct contribution to GDP is not as large as headline figures suggest. The reasons: a large amount of AI equipment relies on imports and may not be fully counted in U.S. domestic output; at the same time, AI construction does crowd out some resources, with the crowding-out effect concentrated in three areas: cloud providers shifting internal budgets from traditional cloud services to AI, data center construction crowding out other commercial building resources, and AI-related debt financing driving up borrowing costs for other companies. In other words, AI investment is changing capital flows, but it is not strong enough to single-handedly rewrite the U.S. economic cycle. Goldman Sachs estimates that after accounting for direct and indirect impacts, AI’s net boost to U.S. GDP growth in 2026 may only be around 0.1 percentage points. This means AI remains a core driver of corporate earnings and structural stock market trends, but it should not be simply extrapolated as a reason for a broad acceleration of the U.S. economy.