White House “AI Czar”: Halting AI equals halting the U.S. economy; nearly three-quarters of Q1 GDP growth relies on AI

According to Beating Monitoring, after the White House AI and Cryptocurrency Affairs Advisor David Sacks reposted Morgan Stanley’s latest capital expenditure report, he commented that AI investment has a greater impact on U.S. GDP growth than the outside world perceives, approximately 2.5% this year and over 3% next year. Q1 data already shows that AI-related investments contributed about 75% of U.S. GDP growth. His conclusion is: polls show AI is unpopular, but economic growth is welcomed; stopping AI now is equivalent to stopping the U.S. economy.

Sacks believes that even these figures underestimate the actual impact for two reasons: Morgan Stanley’s scope only covers five large cloud providers, excluding startup companies and other enterprises’ AI investments; capital expenditure is just money for building “token factories,” and the economic activities produced within the factories are not included. He believes the return on investment from capital expenditure will ultimately far exceed the expenditure itself.

The Morgan Stanley data he reposted shows that the five major cloud providers (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle) have raised their capital expenditure forecasts for 2026 from the previous $765 billion to about $805 billion, and for 2027 from $951 billion to $1.1 trillion.