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Comment by altacc | Hacker News Reader

The post mentions the AI boom boosting the numbers. From Fortune[1]: "Analyst estimates from Renaissance Macro Research indicate that so far in 2025, the dollar value contributed to GDP growth by AI data center expenditure surpassed the total impact from all U.S. consumer spending"

That is worrying as that spending is constrained to a small sector that concentrates and solidifies a lot of wealth with diluted "trickle down" effects. If/when the AI industry corrects there will be a significant impact on the US economy & stock market, which I think will have a bigger negative effect on the "person in the street" than any possible positive effect from the current high spending on AI technology.

[1] https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/data-center-artificial-intell...

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> Or as Rusty Foster, author of the widely read media blog Today in Tabs, puts it: “Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.”

lol

I saw someone comment that US GDP is shrinking if you exclude AI cap ex.

As a compounding area of concern, as AI thus becomes a single point of failure for the whole economy. Most analysts beleive that AI is in a hype bubble, with even Gartner projecting half of AI firms to shutter in the next 18 months. That basically means the circus tent is about to collapse.

I don't know why people keep referring to AI as a hype bubble. A bubble usually implies that the majority of the population doesn't see the hype and bubble for what it is (see the run up to the 2008 housing crisis, where everyone and their brother was flipping houses). In the case of AI, pretty much everyone outside of the tech and AI spaces has smelled the BS from get go.

Bubbles do damage when they pop and surprise everyone, but I don't think too many people outside of SV will be surprised when this train eventually goes off the tracks.

The problem here is not that there's an AI bubble, it's that the AI and tech folks are so disconnected from regular people.

Was the same in the 1990s I'd contend. I distinctly remember talking to my dad about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything. As a teenager I was all into everything going on. His words were "This won't last they don't have enough customers and costs are too high" I'd like to give him credit for predicting this but I don't think he was alone in that realization.

This is were AI maybe today cost too high, not enough customers. Some firms will survive (Amazon/Google of the AI era) others will fold.

I think there plenty of success stories out there but there a lot of snakeoil propped up by VCs.

Who will be the pet.com of the 2020s?

Also everyone and their cab drivers have money in Nvidia right now. I think we all get hurt here.

dot com bubble was a way to make retirement funds pay for global telecom infrastructure. after the companies are gone, infrastructure is still there. google is buying dark fiber to this day...

the last gpu-fuelled bubbles (gaming, web3, ai) are an attempt to starve enemies of chips without kinect involvement. you will have datacenters filled with garbage tech when it's over.

so, no, there won't be a pets.com in this space because as soon as it bursts, it crushes their business defensibility (access to chips and power) will be gone as the price plummet. there's no consumer products.

i guess the analogy to dotcom, is if people were buying pets.com stock just because it had more Herman Miller chairs!

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