Data center buildout share of US GDP is still relatively small (but rapidly growing) | Epoch AI

Data Insight<br>Jun. 5, 2026

The AI boom has doubled computing infrastructure's share of US GDP

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By Isabel Juniewicz

The AI infrastructure boom, which began in 2023, has more than doubled the share of US GDP attributable to computing infrastructure. Investment in AI-related data center construction, compute hardware, and networking equipment accounted for ~0.8% of US GDP in Q1 2026, driving computing infrastructure as a whole to ~1.5% of GDP, up from a 2015–2022 average of ~0.7%. AI infrastructure is now the leading driver of growth in private investment in the US.

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This measure focuses on private investment and excludes buildouts that occur outside of the US, even if by US-headquartered companies.

Epoch's work is free to use, distribute, and reproduce provided the source and authors are credited under the Creative Commons BY<br>license.

Learn more about this graph<br>Our data insight on data center costs indicated that the three biggest cost components are the servers, the facility, and the networking infrastructure. The growth in spending on these categories is now a meaningful component of US GDP. We approximate US-based investment in the data center buildout in each of these three categories:

Above trend spending on computers and peripherals (BEA)

Spending on data center construction (Census)

Spending on networking equipment (own estimate)

We use national economic statistics when feasible. Networking equipment is still too small a share of the investment series on communications equipment to obtain as clear a growth signal as we can from the compute and peripherals series, so we construct our own estimate based on market research.

Data

Computers & peripherals (C&P)<br>Bureau of Economic Analysis via FRED (B935RC1Q027SBEA), private fixed investment in computers and peripheral equipment, nominal SAAR.

Data center construction<br>Census Bureau Construction Spending (C30) survey, data center sub-line, nominal SAAR. We aggregate monthly observations to quarterly averages.

Networking equipment (own estimate)<br>We use IDC estimates of the datacenter share of Arista revenue (SEC) and their estimates of the Arista share of the total datacenter Ethernet market, as well as information about Nvidia’s Data Center Networking Segment (SEC). Some networking equipment (such as NVLink in servers) counts as part of computers and peripherals.

We crosscheck this estimate against Broadcom silicon revenue and estimates of their share of the silicon used in Ethernet switches.

GDP<br>Bureau of Economic Analysis via FRED, nominal SAAR.

Analysis

To estimate datacenter share of computers and peripherals, we project the 2015-2022 trend in C&P share of GDP through to the present and attribute growth above trend to AI. This is similar to the methodology in Brandsaas et al (2025) which validated the NIPA C&P data with microdata on project plans. Growth in C&P since mid-2023 also closely tracks both net imports of GPUs to the US (HS series 8471.50 and 8473.30) and growth in the US-customer share of Nvidia revenues.

To estimate datacenter networking we use the IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker. IDC reports Arista’s share of the global datacenter Ethernet switch market (19% in Q3 2025) and the DC segment share of Arista’s own switch revenue (91%). Combined with Arista’s quarterly revenue from SEC filings, this lets us back out the global DC Ethernet switch market (~$36 billion annualized in Q3 2025). We scale by 70% to estimate the US share, consistent with approximate hyperscaler capex geography. We add Nvidia InfiniBand switches to this estimate, the main non-Ethernet networking gear that sits standalone in datacenter racks. Nvidia doesn’t break out InfiniBand separately, so we estimate it by interpolating Dell’Oro’s estimates of published AI back-end fabric market size combined with their reported InfiniBand share of that market.

Assumptions and limitations

We construct our own networking estimate rather than using BEA’s Communications Equipment line (FRED B936) because that series bundles data center switching with broader telecom and enterprise networking that doesn’t allow us to isolate AI-related spending.

The C&P category includes non-data-center business IT spending. Some residual non-DC growth may be embedded in the “above-trend” portion, or alternatively, companies may be pulling back on non-AI C&P spending.

All figures are nominal. Real C&P growth is larger than nominal growth due to quality improvements in chips and servers, while data center construction cost inflation makes real construction growth slower than nominal.

Download this data<br>Data center buildout share of US GDP (quarterly)<br>CSV, Updated Jun. 5, 2026

Related topics<br>Economic impactData centers

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