The boom in artificial intelligence products and infrastructure drove a closely watched measure of business spending to a six-year high in March.<\/p>\n
New orders for nondefense capital goods, excluding aircraft, rose 3.3% in March, accelerating from the increase of 1.6% in February, the Census Bureau reported<\/a> Wednesday (April 29).<\/p>\n This metric, dubbed \u201ccore capital goods\u201d by economists, is closely watched as a barometer of business investment, according to multiple media reports.<\/p>\n Reuters reported<\/a> Wednesday that the increase in core capital goods orders was larger than expected. Economists polled by the news organization had expected a 0.5% rise.<\/p>\n The report attributed the rise in business spending on equipment to the boom in investments in AI and the data centers that support the technology.<\/p>\n It added that businesses may also be rushing to buy equipment before prices rise or shortages occur due to the war with Iran.<\/p>\n Advertisement: Scroll to Continue<\/p>\n The Reuters report quoted Stephen Stanley<\/a>, chief U.S. economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets<\/a>, as saying: \u201cThe stunning degree of strength during a month when firms would have had valid reason to be cautious attests to the substantial energy in business development that was bottled up last year due to policy-related uncertainty.\u201d<\/p>\n Bloomberg reported<\/a> Wednesday that the rise in core capital goods orders seen in March was the greatest since mid-2020.<\/p>\n The report said this increase continued a year of \u201csolid\u201d capital investment that has been driven by businesses\u2019 spending on AI.<\/p>\n Economists expect this trend to continue through the end of 2026 due to spending on AI and the availability of more favorable tax provisions, according to the Bloomberg report.<\/p>\n The report quoted Eliza Winger<\/a>, economist at Bloomberg Economics<\/a>, as saying: \u201cBusiness investment is entering the second quarter with solid momentum, supported by strength in AI-related spending. While geopolitical uncertainty bears watching, the data don\u2019t point to any meaningful pullback in capital spending yet.\u201d<\/p>\n It was reported Thursday (April 23) that Meta<\/a> plans to cut 10% of its workforce to offset the investments it has been making in AI infrastructure<\/a>. The company plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion this year on data centers, chips and other AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n On April 20, it was announced that Anthropic<\/a> has committed to spend over $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon Web Services<\/a> (AWS) technologies, including Trainium and Graviton hardware<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was reported April 1 that Meta, Google<\/a> and Amazon<\/a> plan to spend tens of billions of dollars more on data centers<\/a> this year than they expected to meet the demand for AI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The boom in artificial intelligence products and infrastructure drove a closely watched measure of business spending to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418190,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,2999,343,344,197171,85,46,43,262,125,264],"class_list":["post-418189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-infrastructure","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-capital-goods","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news","tag-pymnts-news","tag-technology","tag-whats-hot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418189\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}