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The AI Build-Out as a Share of the U.S. Economy
Capital expenditure of Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon, trailing 12 months, % of U.S. GDP over the same four quarters
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 1 year
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
Palanor calculation: cash purchases of property and equipment from the four companies’ SEC filings, divided by BEA nominal GDP. All of their capital spending, not only AI, and spending to date, not a projection. Assets acquired under finance leases are excluded, so it reads below the companies’ headline capex.
What the four largest cloud companies spend on data centers, servers and other equipment, measured against the size of the U.S. economy rather than in dollars.
What this chart reads
- Hyperscaler Capex as a Share of U.S. GDP (Trailing 12 Months)as “Hyperscaler capex”latest 2026-06-30
Sources
Hyperscaler Capex as a Share of U.S. GDP (Trailing 12 Months). Source: Capital expenditure: cash purchases of property and equipment from each company's 10-Q and 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR XBRL (public domain), as in capex.hyperscalers.ttm. GDP: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, gross domestic product, current dollars, seasonally adjusted annual rate (public domain), as in fred_gdp_nominal. Ratio calculated by Palanor; each point's metadata carries the capex and the four-quarter GDP average used.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.