The United States is in the early innings of an AI-powered economic boom, but if we embrace the degrowth doomers and stop building, the boom stops with us, and Beijing is more than happy to take our place.
Here’s the state of play in 2026:
AI-adjacent companies accounted for more than 80 percent of the S&P 500’s gains this year, leaving the index with virtually zero gains without them. Over the course of President Trump’s second term, the trend becomes even clearer. From May 2024 to June 2026, the S&P 500 gained 142 percent.
Now, if we remove the AI stocks from the equation, that number collapses to just 16 percent, which is just about on par with the pace of inflation, or even lower, depending on who you ask. AI-linked companies now make up almost half of the entire index. And that’s not because the market is driven by pure hype and a lack of fundamentals. The AI sector is producing at an unprecedented pace of innovation, and markets are rewarding companies participating in that reality.
Chip companies, data center hosts and builders, energy providers, and software corporations are among the dominant categories turning AI into real products and services. They are the ones putting the American economy and Americans’ retirement accounts on their backs. At the same time, the non-AI-associated economy is struggling, through a combination of inflation, rapidly increasing debt, an insecure housing market, among other factors
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