The AI boom is on track to become the largest single-industry infrastructure buildout in more than a century, according to new estimates published by the Brookings Institution.
The Wall Street Journal reports that economist Stijn van Nieuwerburgh projects that total investment in data centers and related AI infrastructure will reach $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032, averaging 3.6 percent of GDP a year. Goldman Sachs, using a different method, puts AI investment in the U.S. at 1.9 percent of GDP in 2026 alone. The last time a single new industry claimed a bigger share of the economy was the railroad boom of the late 19th century.
Van Nieuwerburgh’s numbers put that in perspective. Canal construction from 1836 to 1841 averaged 0.66 percent of GDP annually. Railroads from 1870 to 1890 averaged 2.24 percent. Electrification from 1905 to 1925 came in at 0.5 percent, the interstate highway system from 1956 to 1973 at 1.13 percent, and the telecom and fiber-optic buildout from 1996 to 2003 at 1.1 percent. His estimate for AI infrastructure, 3.63 percent from 2025 to 2032, tops them all.
The spending already shows up in construction data. Through July, seasonally adjusted spending on private data center construction hit $37 billion, about $9 billion more than the same stretch last year, according to the Commerce Department. Private construction spending on everything else, meanwhile, fell roughly $46 billion below year-earlier levels over those same seven months.
That gap is starting to reshape local economies. The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond recently reported that data center construction is straining labor availability in its region. In Mississippi, a proposed aluminum smelter that would have brought an estimated 1,000 permanent jobs went to Oklahoma instead last year. A data center announced near one of the sites under consideration, near Vicksburg, had tied up the electricity supply the smelter needed, according to a person familiar with the operator’s decision-making. Didi Caldwell, a site-selection consultant who works with heavy industry, put it plainly: “It’s crowding out manufacturing.”
Capital spending is also piling up among a handful of companies. Analysts expect Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle, the five major hyperscalers, to spend a combined $4.2 trillion over the four years ending in 2029, according to FactSet. More of that money is coming from debt. Van Nieuwerburgh said tech companies often borrow through off-balance-sheet entities from banks and private-credit firms, arrangements that come with little public reporting, which makes the scale of the financial risk hard to gauge.
Skilled trades are feeling the pull too. In the Washington DC area, the number of unionized electricians has climbed from 9,000 to 17,500 in recent years, said Don Slaiman, political coordinator of trade union IBEW Local 26. “A lot of folks come here to pay off their college debt,” he said. Kwaku Afriyie, 23, has a college degree in cybersecurity. He left an entry-level IT job last year, worried AI would eventually replace him, and retrained as an electrician; he now assembles data-center components as an apprentice earning about $30 an hour. Tyler Beam, 28, has spent most of the past two years building data centers for a company that ships prefabricated parts to Amazon construction sites nationwide. He most recently earned $62 an hour plus overtime, often working 58-hour weeks with some hours paid double, and recently bought a GMC Yukon and started house-hunting. “They want to put them up as fast as possible,” he said.
AI data centers and the integration of this technology is changing the political landscape. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.