The ChatGPT chatbot icon from OpenAl Company. Photo: AFP/TTXVN
However, while hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into data centers, processing chips, and next-generation AI models, economists are still unsure whether these massive investments will create the productivity revolution that is expected.
Global investments in AI are projected to reach approximately $750 billion by 2026. This figure includes the cost of building large-scale data centers, developing new AI models, manufacturing semiconductor chips, and expanding power supply capacity to support the AI industry.
According to analysts, the current scale of investment is only comparable to the internet boom of the 1990s. Florence Pisani, chief economist at asset management firm Candriam, said that AI alone is currently contributing nearly one percentage point to US economic growth this year, although the actual impact is lower because a large portion of the equipment and components are imported from Asia.
Société Générale estimates that AI-related investments could contribute approximately 0.4 percentage points to global economic growth in 2026. According to experts, this is one of the factors helping the world economy maintain its resilience against recent shocks such as tensions in the Middle East or new US tariffs.
Beyond impacting current growth, AI is becoming a major driver in financial markets. Wall Street investors expect profits for companies manufacturing chips, building data centers, and providing AI infrastructure to continue to surge for many years to come.
However, the biggest question remains whether AI will truly create a leap in labor productivity like the Internet did. Current research still yields very different conclusions.
In 2024, economist Daron Acemoglu, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, sparked controversy by suggesting that the impact of AI on productivity over the next 10 years might be limited. Conversely, the Brookings Institute in the US predicted that AI could boost labor productivity by an average of 1.8% per year for a decade, a level of impact comparable to that of the internet at the end of the last century.
According to experts, the reason the economic benefits of AI are not yet clear is because the technology is still in its early stages of application. Arthur Mensch, CEO of the French AI company Mistral, believes that AI has profoundly changed the way software engineers work.
According to him, instead of directly writing code, many programmers now simply describe the requirements for AI to perform most of the work. This can help an individual complete tasks many times faster. However, as organizations grow larger, issues of internal coordination, management processes, and organizational structure become barriers that prevent the productivity benefits from being immediately apparent.
In other words, AI can create significant changes at the individual level, but it takes longer to translate into economic benefits at the enterprise or global economy level.
Even in the US, the world leader in AI, the application of this technology is still largely in the experimental stage. Approximately 71% of US businesses reported using AI at least once in the past six months. However, the majority have only applied it to a limited number of tasks. Only 7% of businesses reported widespread use of AI in their operations.
Nevertheless, some professions have begun to see significant changes, particularly software programming, translation, digital content production, and video creation.
Recent indications suggest that the economic impact of AI may be entering a new phase. In late May, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published research comparing the current development of AI to the early days of the internet's widespread adoption in the late 1990s.
The results show that the current impact of AI on the US economy is equivalent to the position the Internet held in 1997, just before the technology brought about profound changes to manufacturing and business operations.
The study's authors believe there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that the US economy is nearing a period of stronger and more sustainable productivity growth thanks to AI. However, according to Le Monde, it is still too early to say whether AI will become a technological revolution on the scale of the Internet or the steam engine. The only certainty is that the world is witnessing an unprecedented wave of investment, while the long-term economic impacts of this technology remain to be seen.
According to VNA
Source: https://baoangiang.com.vn/ai-va-canh-bac-dau-tu-lon-nhat-thap-ky-a488206.html
![[Image] National conference summarizing one year of operation of the overall organizational model of the political system, the three-tiered government model.](https://vphoto.vietnam.vn/thumb/1200x675/vietnam/resource/IMAGE/2026/07/01/1782882811691_ndo_br_1-jpg.webp)
