Tootfinder

Q1’s –0.5% growth is already a bad look. But Apollo’s Torsten SlŸk points out that data-center construction alone added about a full percentage point. Remove it, and you’re staring at –1.5%.
Q2 looks so much healthier at 3.0%, or you would think so. Pantheon Macroeconomics sums up the first half of 2025 with some more sobriety: AI alone contributed about half a percentage point of GDP. Without it, the U.S. would be bumbling along at 1% growth. Still better than minus, but thin grass all the same.
One more stat for the better view: since 2019, investment in AI-sensitive sectors is up 53%, while everywhere else is basically flat – 0.3%.
https://www.turingpost.com/p/fod114?_bhlid=f437d028caabcb66cc36e677728d12aea2504a71

Assessing the economic benefits of space weather mitigation investment decisions: Evidence from Aotearoa New Zealand
Edward J. Oughton, Andrew Renton, Daniel Mac Marnus, Craig J. Rodger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12495

Assessing the economic benefits of space weather mitigation investment decisions: Evidence from Aotearoa New Zealand
Space weather events pose a growing threat to modern economies, yet their macroeconomic consequences still remain underexplored. This study presents the first dedicated economic assessment of geomagnetic storm impacts on Aotearoa New Zealand, quantifying potential GDP losses across seven disruption and mitigation scenarios due to an extreme coronal mass ejection (CME). The primary focus is upon the damaging impacts of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on the electrical power transmission …

The scale of investment and the involvement of governments means ROI must be found (or rather created) now, by any means necessary! Demand already is being forcefully created to justify these expenditures. Business models, regulations and policies/politics are pivoted in lockstep. Aside from all the conceptual, ethical and environmental issues of LLMs and their required infrastructure, these shifts are already also impacting chip/hardware production pipelines and start spelling the end of pe…

samim (@samim@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6m, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/ The 'magnificent 7' spent more than $100 billion on data centers and the like in the past three months *alone* As a % of GDP, spending on AI infra has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing. This spending is so big it’s acting as a sort of privat…