Billionaire investor Steve Eisman warns of a very different economic reality if one were to remove the gains of AI from the equation.
The financial analyst best-known for predicting the 2008 housing collapse—and made famous by the 2015 film The Big Short—said on a recent episode of The Real Eisman Playbook podcast that the U.S. economy is a “tale of two cities”: While GDP growth may indicate a robust economy, by removing AI expenditures from the picture, you instead see stagnation.
The U.S. GDP in 2024 was $29.18 trillion, estimated to grow by 1.8% in 2025, Eisman said. That 1.8% growth is worth about $530 billion. But if you were to factor in the AI infrastructure spending by Magnificent Seven companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, it would total about $400 billion, by Eisman’s calculations, meaning if you were to subtract that sum from the projected growth of U.S. GDP, it would amount to very little.
“The U.S. economy is not even growing, really, 50 basis points outside of AI,” Eisman said. “So clearly there have to be pockets of weakness.”
A wealth of economists and tech giants have warned of an expanding AI bubble as investments in the technology mount with little robust evidence so far of the technology’s transformative ability. As concerns over little job growth and creeping inflation grow, so too does worry about the health of the U.S. economy.
