Tepidly socially-acceptable welfare

Yes, wow. When I heard that data point I was floored.

For context though, consumer spending has contracted significantly.

It's not as bad as the alarmist phrasing would suggest. Consider a toy example: suppose consumer spending was $100 and grew by $1, but AI spending was $10 and grew by $1.5, then you can rightly claim that "AI added more to the grow of the US economy than all consumer spending combined"[1]. But it's not as if the economy consists mostly of AI, or that if AI spending stopped the economy will collapse. It just means AI is a major contributor to the economy's growth right now. It's not even certain that the AI bubble popping would lead to all of that growth evaporating. Much of the AI boom involves infrastructure build out for data centers. That can be reallocated to building houses if datacenters are no longer needed.

[1] Things get even spicier if consumer growth was zero. Then what would the comparison? That AI added infinitely more to growth than consumer spending? What if it was negative? All this shows how ridiculous the framing is.

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), 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...):

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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) 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.

Trump and his administration harassing the Fed and Powell over interest rates is like a swarm of locust salivating at ripened wheat fields. They want a quick feast at the expense of everything and everyone else, including themselves over the long term.

You really think the AI bubble can be sustained for another three years?

I am curious, why do you think lower interest rates are bad for an average person?

Nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft

MS salespeople presumably already have weekly or monthly meetings with all the people with check-cutting authority, and OpenAI doesn't. They're already an approved vendor, and what's more the Azure bill is already really really big, so a few more AI charges barely register.

It's the same reason you would use RDS at an AWS shop, even if you really like CloudSQL better.

This is the main reason the big cloud vendors are so well-positioned to suck up basically any surplus from any industry even vaguely shaped like a b2b SaaS.

It’s because most companies already have a lot of confidence with Microsoft contracts, and are generally very comfortable storing and processing highly sensitive data on Microsoft’s SaaS platforms. It’s a significant advantage.

Also Microsoft Azure hosts its own OpenAI models. It isn’t a proxy for OpenAI.

All of their files are likely on a Microsoft store already too.

There is obvious utility to railroads, especially in a world with no cars.

The net utility of AI is far more debatable.

Ai bubble, economy in the trash already, inflation from tariffs. Dollar might get real cheap when big holders start selling stocks and exchanging it, nobody wants to be left holding their bag, and they have a lot of dollars.

Which is their (Thiel, project2025, etc) plan, federal land will be sold for cheap.

> Likely one that makes the first look like a sideshow.

The first Great Depression was pretty darn bad, I'm not at all convinced that this hypothetical one would be worse.

Tbf I think most would say that the VR/AR boom is still ongoing, just with less glitz.

Edit: agree on the metaverse as implemented/demoed not being much, but that's literally one application

I posted a comment yesterday regarding this with links to a couple relevant studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44793392 -- briefly:

* Even with all this infra buildout all the hyperscalers are constantly capacity constrained, especially for GPUs.

* Surveys are showing that most people are only using AI for a fraction of the time at work, and still reporting significant productivity benefits, even with current models.

The AGI/ASI hype is a distraction, potentially only relevant to the frontier model labs. Even if all model development froze today, there is tremendous untapped demand to be met.

The Metaverse/VR/AR boom was never a boom, with only 2 big companies (Meta, Apple) plowing any "real" money into it. Similarly with crypto, another thing that AI is unjustifiably compared to. I think because people were trying to make it happen.

With the AI boom, however, the largest companies, major governments and VCs are all investing feverishly because it is already happening and they want in on it.