The AI Investment Boom Continues to Drive GDP Growth

In the first nine months of 2025, AI categories represented 37% of real GDP growth from the same period in 2024. (Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• AI-related investments contributed 14% to the third quarter’s real GDP growth of $254 billion, a moderation from earlier in the year.
• In the first nine months of 2025, AI categories accounted for 37% of real GDP growth, with software and servers being major contributors.
• The recent federal government shutdown delayed data collection, leading to potential inaccuracies in the third-quarter GDP report.

Artificial-intelligence investment continued to be a big driver of U.S. economic growth in the third quarter, though that trend moderated in the period.

Gross domestic product categories related to AI investment (computers and peripheral equipment, communication equipment, data center structure investment, software, and research and development) had their smallest contribution to GDP growth this year in the just-reported third quarter. They represented 14% of the $254 billion of inflation-adjusted, or real, GDP growth from the second quarter.

This is still an outsize contribution from these categories, which are about 8% of real GDP.

In the first nine months of 2025, the AI categories represented 37% of real GDP growth from the same period in 2024. The biggest contributors to this trend have been software, accounting for 16% of growth, and the servers that fill AI data centers with another 14%. The real GDP growth rate in this period was 2.1%, but would have been 1.5% without the AI tailwind.

There is reason to be skeptical of the third-quarter data, however. The latest GDP report comes in the wake of a long federal government shutdown during which there was no data collection.

For example, the data center structure investment number comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly construction data. These only go through August, only part of the third quarter, with no dates provided yet for the release of September data.

“The federal government shutdown that occurred in October and November resulted in delays in many of the principal source data that are used to produce estimates of GDP,” said the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which publishes GDP data, in a note that accompanied the third-quarter release.

Even more than is usual, investors will have to wait for the GDP revisions to accurately understand what happened to the U.S. economy in the third quarter.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com