Data center investment drives US economy growth
There is surging demand for new data centers that can meet the demands of emerging AI technology
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Investment in data centers and information processing technology played a major role in US GDP growth in the first half of 2025, according to a Harvard economist.
Jason Furman posted on social media platform X that investment in information processing equipment and software is 4 percent of GDP, but it was responsible for 92 percent of GDP growth in H1. GDP excluding these categories grew at a 0.1 percent annual rate in the period, according to Furman.
In his post, Furman stated that it’s “probably not the case” the US economy would have recorded almost no expansion at all absent this buildout, reasoning that “absent the [artificial intelligence] AI boom we would probably have lower interest rates [and] electricity prices, thus some additional growth in other sectors. In very rough terms that could maybe make up about half of what we got from the AI boom.”
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Join NowSurging demand for data centers
In August, Renaissance Macro Research estimated that the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data-center buildout had surpassed US consumer spending for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, demand in the global data center market is forecast to grow substantially in the next half-decade or so, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Analysts estimate current demand to be approximately 62 gigawatts (GW), comprised of cloud workloads (58 percent), traditional workloads (29 percent) and AI workloads (13 percent).
Asia-Pacific (PACA) and North America have the most power demand for data centers and square footage online today, most notably in Northern Virginia, Beijing, Shanghai and Texas, Goldman Sachs stated.
A new age for data centers
Data centers from the pre-AI era are generally ill-equipped for the demands of modern AI workloads. A recent study by global data center consultancy BCS found that most data center facilities aren’t ready for AI-heavy workloads with the sector set for radical transformation.
In a survey of over 3,000 data center professionals across 41 countries, 85 percent of respondents admitted that their facilities are not yet prepared for the demands of AI-heavy workloads, with just one in seven organizations using AI at scale.
To address this lack of readiness, many of those polled (79 percent) are increasing their infrastructure to facilitate AI readiness, while 63 percent believe AI could ease pressure on staffing and operations.
“We’re entering a pivotal moment for the data center industry. As AI moves from buzzword to backbone, it’s reshaping not just what we build, but where, how and why we build it,” said James Hart, CEO at BCS.
“The infrastructure that powered the last decade of digital growth isn’t enough for what comes next. From compute-heavy model training to real-time inference at the edge, new demands are emerging that call for fresh thinking, faster decisions and more flexible, sustainable solutions.”
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Tech giants are investing billions in new data centers
A number of tech giants are pouring billions of dollars into building and upgrading data centers in response to the increasing demand for AI and large language models (LLMs) that require massive computing resources.
In September, NVIDIA and OpenAI signed a deal to build at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers. The collaboration will enable the deployment of a minimum of 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure to train and run its next generation of models on the path to deploying superintelligence.
In July, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said the social media giant will build huge AI data centers in the US. Just one site will cover an area nearly the size of Manhattan, New York, according to Zuckerberg. The first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026.
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