This week, the latest developments from major technology companies—especially their ambitious capital expenditure plans finalized for 2026—essentially tell an important story about the direction of the macroeconomy.

Overall, according to forecasts from four leading technology companies, the artificial intelligence investment boom that is driving economic growth in 2025 may play an even more prominent role in 2026.

According to Bloomberg calculations, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend approximately $650 billion in capital expenditures this year, significantly higher than the "mere" $359 billion in 2025.  Ten years ago, this figure was only $31 billion.

These figures are staggering—and even more noteworthy is that this scale does not yet include the enormous sums invested by numerous other companies in data centers, semiconductors, software development, and the power infrastructure that underpins all of these areas.

For context, the latest data shows that total annual non-residential investment spending in the United States (i.e., all the money spent on every office building, factory, piece of machinery, and software deployment) amounts to $4.3 trillion.

It's easy to deduce from this that a few hyperscale data center operators may account for a significant portion of all investment in the United States this year.

The implication is this: it's usually unwise to directly link the actions of any single company to macroeconomic variables like GDP. The U.S. economy is vast and complex, and even the largest companies struggle to significantly impact overall economic trends on their own.

For example, Walmart may be the world's largest retailer, but its sales in the U.S. only account for about 2% of total U.S. personal consumption expenditures.

The AI boom, however, seems to be an exception to this rule—the scale of investment by a few tech giants is large enough to drive GDP growth, and may even surpass their main contribution to the economy in 2025. RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas told the media: "Large technology companies' capital expenditure intentions for 2025 are an unusually high order of magnitude higher than expected."

"If actual spending matches planned spending, this would strongly suggest upside risk to the general expectation of 2.2% GDP growth next year."

However, the reality is that not every billion dollars spent by a giant tech company directly translates into a billion dollars of GDP growth. The actual economic transmission process is far more complex.

These massive expenditures may crowd out other potential investment opportunities: on the one hand, they will drive up overall borrowing costs, and on the other hand, they will occupy limited physical resources. For example, land being used to build a new data center might otherwise have been used to build a new warehouse if there were no investment demand in the artificial intelligence sector.

Furthermore, if such investments rely heavily on imported equipment—such as semiconductor products from Taiwan—it will have a certain offsetting effect on economic growth. Because GDP accounting aims to reflect domestic output, the expenditure on imported goods needs to be deducted in the calculation to obtain accurate results.

In addition, there is still uncertainty about the impact of artificial intelligence investment spending on job creation. This is because artificial intelligence is a capital-intensive industry, and its labor intensity is not high, making it difficult to directly drive a large number of jobs like traditional industries.

However, what is noteworthy is that artificial intelligence investment itself, and the returns it aims to bring to the entire economy, mean that social productivity will increase significantly in the coming years.

In fact, the weak job growth but high GDP growth in the US last year clearly demonstrated this trend.

Brusuelas said: "If productivity-enhancing investments come close to planned capital expenditures, it means that productivity will grow strongly in the coming year."

Kevin Warsh, President Trump's nominee for Federal Reserve Chairman, is betting on the Fed cutting interest rates based on this core premise.