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The Nvidia-sized hole in US GDP statistics | Epoch AI

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US GDP growth has been underestimated by about 0.3 percentage points because statistics miss most of Nvidia's US-generated income, a gap that could widen to 2 points by 2028. Epoch AI traces the accounting gap through Nvidia's fabless chip supply chain.

Executive summary The AI boom has driven US investment in computing equipment to roughly $400 billion per year, nearly triple its 2023 level. Yet the measured impact on GDP growth has remained modest. The conventional explanation is that much of this investment is spent on imported technology goods, which are subtracted from GDP. In this report, we show that this explanation is incomplete: GDP statistics have a blind spot around the value American firms, most notably Nvidia, create by designing AI chips that are manufactured and sold abroad. This has led to a substantial underestimation of…

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