Why the AI Boom Has Barely Changed the U.S. Current Account So Far

Summary

The AI boom has sharply increased U.S. imports of semiconductors, servers, and computing equipment, but it has not substantially changed the country’s current account so far. A Liberty Street Economics analysis explains that the current account is governed by the gap between national saving and domestic investment, rather than by gross import flows alone. AI-related imports reached 23% of U.S. imports in 2025, but gross domestic investment remained close to its pre-pandemic level: 21.3% of GDP in the five years before the pandemic, 21.5% from 2023 through the first quarter of 2026, and 21.1% over the latest four quarters. AI investment in data centers and information-processing equipment largely replaced weakness in factory construction, nontechnology structures and equipment, and residential investment. The current account deficit nevertheless widened from an average of about 2.2% of GDP in 2015–19 to roughly 3.7% since 2023, with the change coming mainly from lower saving. Private saving averaged 20.8% of GDP since 2023, only half a percentage point below its pre-pandemic average, and the article finds no dot-com-era surge in household consumption from rising equity wealth. Business saving also held up: it averaged 10.9% of GDP over the latest four quarters, compared with about 10.5% before the pandemic and roughly 8.8% at the dot-com trough. Government saving moved in the opposite direction, falling from about -2.2% of GDP in 2015–19 to -4.0% since 2023. Relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, government dissaving accounts for about 1.75 percentage points of the roughly 2.4-point widening in the saving-investment gap, lower private saving for about half a point, and higher investment for essentially none. The author cautions that larger technology-firm capital-spending plans for 2026 and 2027, combined with a possible recovery in non-AI investment, could eventually make AI-driven investment and weaker business saving widen the deficit.