I'm not an expert, my knowledge is just from reading around a lot, but I think there's some stats that would suggest the US is particularly exposed:

- At points, AI investment has actually seen more spending that US consumer spending[0], there's some debate on this[1] but if true, that leads to a narrative of the US being 'propped up' by AI investment.

- US GDP growth was strong last year, but behind quite a lot of other similar countries like the UK, Germany and Japan, which doesn't suggest a comparatively strong economy.

- The US is actively increasing it's borrowing substantially (Big Beautiful Bill) while lowering it's currencies value through trade wars and unpredictability (see bond market). That reduces its ability to use its wealth to borrow its way out of a financial crash (like with the 2008 crash, or Covid).

This could be a little overblown and is hard to tell, the US is definitely an extremely wealthy country, even if its less wealthy comparatively that a few years prior.

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

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/26/ai-wasnt-the-biggest-engine-...

What else does the economy consist of these days? It's pretty much already in a recession if you exclude the big AI companies.

Besides, basically every company had been desperately shoving AI into all their products. Throwing all of that out when the bubble pops won't be pretty.

> now if that will take the rest of the US economy as well.... debatable.

In the grand scheme of GDP, the US hasn't done much growth in anhtjjg else this decade, all while massively increasing spending to prevent post COVID recessions.

It certainly doesn't look good. But this was being setup for 30 years as we outsourced our strong manufacturing wing to make the top brass richer in the short run. So I do think the house of cards falls if AI does.

The sad part is that we may have been able to whether the storm under the right leadership. But that sure isn't the leadership in the White House right now.

Yes, the concentration of wealth led to the AI boom and it’s going to lead to the crash for sure. The AI boom was nothing but a crypto bubble. And since it’s making up a large majority of the investment right now I would say that’s the only reason that we didn’t have a crash last year.

Is there really a bubble though?

Most of the activity is with the same old big tech stocks, and the largest investment by far is not even market driven. Stargate is defense spending.

AI doesn't have to sway consumers, and it doesn't even have to work that well now or ever for governments to keep pumping money into it. The whole point of Stargate is to de-risk with reduced need for security clearances to handle big data (whistleblowing) and eventually get away from foreign tech. Also, there are a ton of businesses who have always done things on-premises for compliance and they can now cut costs by migrating to these government vetted data centers.

It genuinely shocks me how rarely anyone brings this up. It's been very loudly said by Trump and OpenAI since he took office, and it was going to happen regardless of who was elected.