The S&P 500 gained 142 percent from May 2024 to June 2026 during President Trump’s second term. Strip out AI-linked companies, and that number collapses to just 16 percent — barely keeping pace with inflation.
AI isn’t hype. It’s the only engine pulling the American economy forward right now.
AI-adjacent companies accounted for more than 80 percent of the S&P 500’s gains this year, leaving the index with virtually zero gains without them. AI-linked companies now make up almost half of the entire index. The non-AI economy is struggling through inflation, rapidly increasing debt, and an insecure housing market.
Without AI, we could very well be staring down the potential of a long, crippling downturn.
The five biggest American tech companies alone plan to spend over $600 billion on infrastructure by the end of 2026. That is more than the annual GDP of the vast majority of countries, deployed in a single year, by a handful of American companies.
According to a McKinsey study, companies using AI are slashing logistics costs by 5 to 20 percent, inventory by 20 to 30 percent, and procurement spending by 5 to 15 percent. A June 2026 AI Adoption Study surveyed supply chain leaders across North America and Europe and found that supplementing with AI-driven decisions represents roughly a $55 million opportunity for a $1 billion company.
Cheaper logistics means cheaper groceries, cheaper shipping, cheaper everything.
Health care applications are accelerating. There are now more than 170 AI-discovered drug programs in human clinical trials, with 15 to 20 expected to enter final-stage trials this year alone. AI-discovered drugs are passing Phase I safety trials at twice the rate of traditionally discovered processes.
On the solopreneur front, AI is making it possible for individual Americans to have virtually unlimited productivity tools at their disposal. In May 2026, American solopreneurs filed around half a million new business applications. There are now almost 30 million nonemployer businesses in America generating trillions in revenue. A study conducted by Stripe found that AI is chiefly responsible for the solopreneur boom.
All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. Anyone in America can weaponize AI to do work that once required entire departments. With a little AI assist, you can now do your own marketing, design your own products, and vibe code your own website.
Data centers are the heart of the modern American technological economy in 2026. These are literally the physical factories of the intelligence age.
If we do not build them, the consequences are immediately apparent. Without AI compute infrastructure, America cannot scale an AI economy. Without an AI economy, the one engine pulling the U.S. market forward will stall out.
China is not waiting for us to figure out how to stay on top. Beijing has made data centers a national strategic priority, and its capacity is on track to nearly double to 60 gigawatts by 2030. China is electricity-rich, and its data centers pay less than half what American facilities pay for electricity.
The AI race will be won by whoever capitalizes on the opportunity to scale compute and generate power for the physical infrastructure of the AI age.
If America loses this race, we lose the commanding heights of the global economy to our fiercest competitor — an authoritarian one-party state with polar opposite founding principles to those of the United States.
Lawmakers in D.C. do not need to subsidize this revolution with infinite loopholes and pork legislation. They need to just stop strangling innovation and let markets work. Our best and brightest business leaders want to build the infrastructure necessary to keep America atop the global hierarchy.
We should just let them cook.
