BlockBeats News, August 13th — Goldman Sachs believes that the market is witnessing two overinterpreted scenarios regarding the macro impact of AI capital spending: on one hand, investors are underestimating the ripple effect of AI investment on the tech, energy, and data center supply chains; on the other hand, the AI frenzy's impact on the overall U.S. economy and investment in other industries is being exaggerated.

Goldman Sachs economists Jessica Rindels and David Mericle estimated in their latest report that this year's AI-related investment could reach around $600 billion, equivalent to about 2% of the U.S. GDP, around 10% of corporate fixed investment, and about 15% of equipment investment. This scale is enough to explain why AI infrastructure remains one of the most critical trading themes in the U.S. stock market and why NVIDIA, cloud providers, data centers, power equipment, and the semiconductor supply chain continue to attract funding.

However, Goldman Sachs also cautioned that the direct contribution of AI investment to GDP is not as significant as the headline number suggests. This is because a large amount of AI equipment is imported and may not be entirely counted as U.S. domestic output. Additionally, AI construction does indeed squeeze some resources, but this crowding-out effect is mainly concentrated in three areas: cloud providers redirecting budgets from traditional cloud services to AI, data center construction crowding out resources from other commercial buildings, and AI-related debt financing driving up the borrowing costs of other companies.

In other words, AI investment is altering the flow of capital but has not yet reached a level where it can single-handedly reshape the U.S. economic cycle. Goldman Sachs estimates that, taking into account direct and indirect impacts, the net drag of AI on the U.S. GDP growth rate in 2026 may be only around 0.1 percentage point. This suggests that while AI remains a key variable in corporate earnings and stock market structural trends, it should not be simplistically extrapolated as the sole reason for a broad acceleration of the U.S. economy.