{"id":93874,"topic":"ai","source":"marketplace.org","title":"Second quarter GDP growth is brought to you by the letters A and I - marketplace.org","url":"https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/09/30/ai-spending-boosts-q2-gdp-growth-revision","url_hash":"9bbb4ad38a671f8f7f307dfdaffde598bab7d58a","author":"","summary":"Second quarter GDP growth is brought to you by the letters A and I marketplace.org","content":"The U.S. economy grew 2.2% this spring, according to the third and final measurement of quarterly gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It’s an upward revision of 0.7%.\nWhile the consumer continues to carry the economy, businesses also did their part by investing more than was initially thought. It could be the motto of American companies right now: “Put some AI on it.”\n“They're doing what they can to spend on [artificial intelligence] today because they don't want to be left behind when it does become revolutionary to their day-to-day work,” said Shannon Grein, an economist at Wells Fargo.\nIf AI turns out to be an era-defining technology — like, say, the wheel was — companies don't want to be left without any wheels, dragging way behind their competitors. So they’re investing in software and communications equipment.\n“A continued prioritization of things that are high-tech or AI related,” Grein said.\nThat investment is a driver of GDP growth.\nData center buildout is also a contributor, according to Ethan Struby, an economics professor at St. Olaf College.\n“They're building data centers and they're building, they're adding transmission from the utilities or they're building their gas generators on site in order to power the stuff,” he said.\nWhile the building of these structures adds to GDP, some of the chips that go into powering AI are imported, and therefore subtracted from domestic economic growth.\n“The fact that imports are growing is kind of consistent with that. [A lot of this] equipment is … being imported from abroad,” Struby said.\nEven with that taken into account, Wells Fargo estimates that AI spending makes up about a quarter of GDP growth over the past year.\nAll of this investment is meant to make us more productive, but Struby said it’s not entirely clear how that’s going to pan out.\n“The IT boom in the 1990s didn't contribute as much to productivity as you might have expected, given how it seemed like it transformed all of our lives,” he said.\nWe don’t know yet if AI is the next fax machine — which was everywhere in the ‘90s, but ultimately eclipsed by something else — or if it’s the next wheel.","image_url":"https://img.apmcdn.org/31997a2b5174dd0b7da8048f1841760d47ce2832/widescreen/79d746-20260930-aerial-view-of-data-center-2000.jpg","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-09-30T22:46:34+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-10-01T01:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"economy grew 2.2% this spring, according to the third and final measurement of quarterly gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 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It’s an upward revision of 0.7%.\nWhile the consumer continues to carry the economy, businesses also did their part by investing more than was initially thought. It could be the motto of American companies right now: “Put some AI on it.”\n“They're doing what they can to spend on [artificial intelligence] today because they don't want to be left behind when it does become revolutionary to their day-to-day work,” said Shannon Grein, an economist at Wells Fargo.\nIf AI turns out to be an era-defining technology — like, say, the wheel was — companies don't want to be left without any wheels, dragging way behind their competitors. So they’re investing in software and communications equipment.\n“A continued prioritization of things that are high-tech or AI related,” Grein said.\nThat investment is a driver of GDP growth.\nData center buildout is also a contributor, according to Ethan Struby, an economics professor at St. Olaf College.\n“They're building data centers and they're building, they're adding transmission from the utilities or they're building their gas generators on site in order to power the stuff,” he said.\nWhile the building of these structures adds to GDP, some of the chips that go into powering AI are imported, and therefore subtracted from domestic economic growth.\n“The fact that imports are growing is kind of consistent with that. [A lot of this] equipment is … being imported from abroad,” Struby said.\nEven with that taken into account, Wells Fargo estimates that AI spending makes up about a quarter of GDP growth over the past year.\nAll of this investment is meant to make us more productive, but Struby said it’s not entirely clear how that’s going to pan out.\n“The IT boom in the 1990s didn't contribute as much to productivity as you might have expected, given how it seemed like it transformed all of our lives,” he said.\nWe don’t know yet if AI is the next fax machine — which was everywhere in the ‘90s, but ultimately eclipsed by something else — or if it’s the next wheel.","excerpt":"economy grew 2.2% this spring, according to the third and final measurement of quarterly gross domestic product from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 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So they’re investing in software and communications equipment.\n“A continued prioritization of things that are high-tech or AI related,” Grein said.\nThat investment is a driver of GDP growth.\nData center buildout is also a contributor, according to Ethan Struby, an economics professor at St. Olaf College.\n“They're building data centers and they're building, they're adding transmission from the utilities or they're building their gas generators on site in order to power the stuff,” he said.\nWhile the building of these structures adds to GDP, some of the chips that go into powering AI are imported, and therefore subtracted from domestic economic growth.\n“The fact that imports are growing is kind of consistent with that. [A lot of this] equipment is … being imported from abroad,” Struby said.\nEven with that taken into account, Wells Fargo estimates that AI spending makes up about a quarter of GDP growth over the past year.\nAll of this investment is meant to make us more productive, but Struby said it’s not entirely clear how that’s going to pan out.\n“The IT boom in the 1990s didn't contribute as much to productivity as you might have expected, given how it seemed like it transformed all of our lives,” he said.\nWe don’t know yet if AI is the next fax machine — which was everywhere in the ‘90s, but ultimately eclipsed by something else — or if it’s the next wheel.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.marketplace.org/story/2026/09/30/ai-spending-boosts-q2-gdp-growth-revision","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 2170 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 2170 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":2170,"summary_length":277,"usable_text_length":2170,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":2170,"summary_length":277}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}