Goldman Sachs Research: puts 2026 global AI investment at $1.019T, with $581B spent in the US.

About $200B above the hyperscaler figure markets track.

Goldman also expects US AI investment to climb from 1.8% of GDP this year to 2.8% in 2028, while the global share rises from 0.9% to 1.4%.

To isolate AI spending, the economists treat hyperscalers' 2022 capex as a pre-boom baseline and count nearly everything above it in 2026 as AI investment.

They also exclude financial leases where possible, because another company may already have counted the same hardware as its own capex.

This is because, Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google were already spending heavily on data centers before the AI boom, for cloud storage, search, video and advertising. Their capex reports don't split that ordinary spending from AI spending, so Goldman needed a way to estimate how much of the 2026 total is actually AI.

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