U.S. economy is gathering steam. This is the chief reason why.

By Jeffry Bartash

The AI boom shows no sign of easing as Anthropic prepares to go public and businesses gobble up durable goods

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Vera presents his company's Vera chip at the Berlin GPU Technology Conference on Oct. 21.

Artificial-intelligence leader Anthropic and Facebook parent Meta Platforms are aiming to raise up to $200 billion to build out their AI capabilities - and all that business investment is fueling an economic boom in the U.S.

The latest plans piggyback on hundreds of billions of dollars already spent by U.S. companies to flesh out their AI strategies. They are buying massive amounts of chips, computers, electrical equipment, power turbines and all the construction materials need to build data centers, such as steel, concrete, advanced plastics and rare-earth metals.

Surging business investment is supporting faster U.S. growth, rising stocks and a so-called wealth effect that's contributed to strong consumer spending, typically the main locomotive of the economy.

"Business investment has for a while been the strongest component of the economy," said Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at Santander Capital Markets.

In September, a key measure of business investment known as "core orders" rose sharply for the fifth month in a row, the U.S. government reported Tuesday.

What's more, business investment from September 2025 to September 2026 rose by a muscular 13.5%. The last time business investment was that strong was 13 years ago, if the pandemic era is excluded.

Although AI made its first really big splash in 2022, the surge in business investment is more recent. High-tech spending began to take off at the end of 2024, and it's really exploded since this spring.

All the money being spent is showing up in gross domestic product, the official scorecard of the economy. Third-quarter U.S. GDP is forecast to rise at a frothy annual rate of 3% to 4%, potentially marking the biggest spurt of growth in several years.

The GDP report comes out Thursday.

The spending spigot isn't likely to be turned off soon, or even restricted. Anthropic is expected to raise a huge sum of money when it goes public, while Meta (META) and other high-tech giants are pouring even more money into AI.

The boom in spending has turbocharged charged the economy and the stock market DJIA SPX COMP, meanwhile, giving wealthier Americans more money to spend.

Whether all the AI spending turns out to be a speculative bubble remains to be seen, but record sums of money are betting otherwise.

-Jeffry Bartash

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