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I've seen this quote in a couple places and it's misleading. Using non-seasonally adjusted St. Louis FRED data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NA000349Q ht
by troyastorino 1y ago
I've seen this quote in a couple places and it's misleading.
Using non-seasonally adjusted St. Louis FRED data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NA000349Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NA000349Q), and the AI CapEx spending for Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon from the WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/silicon-valley-ai-infrastructure-capex-cffe0431 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/silicon-valley-ai-infrastructure...):
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Q4 2025 consumer spending: ~$5.2 trillion
Q4 2025 AI CapEx spending: ~$75 billion
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Q1 2025 consumer spending: ~$5 trillion
Q1 2025 AI CapEx spending: ~$75 billion
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Q2 2025 consumer spending: ~$5.2 trillion
Q2 2025 AI CapEx spending: ~$100 billion
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So, non-seasonally adjusted consumer spending is flat. In that sense, yes, anything where spend increased contributed more to GDP growth than consumer spending.
If you look at seasonally-adjusted rates, consumer spending has grown ~$400 billion, which might outstrips total AI CapEx in that time period, let alone growth. (To be fair the WSJ graph only shows the spending from Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. But it also says that Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla combined "only" spent $6.7 billion in Q2 2025 vs the $96 billion from the other four. So it's hard to believe that spend coming from elsewhere is contributing a ton.)
If you click through the the tweet that is the source for the WSJ article where the original quote comes from (https://x.com/RenMacLLC/status/1950544075989377196 https://x.com/RenMacLLC/status/1950544075989377196) it's very unclear what it's showing...it only shows percentage change, and it doesn't even show anything about consumer spending.
So, at best this quote is very misleadingly worded. It also seems possible that the original source was wrong.