High-tech capital spending hits record 55% of total US investment in Q2 2026

More than half of every dollar US businesses spent on capital investment last quarter went to high-tech categories. That’s never happened before. High-tech capital spending reached 55.2% of total nonresidential business investment in Q2 2026, according to data tracked by Yardeni Research and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The AI boom, now well into its third year, has turned what was already a strong trend into something that looks more like a structural transformation of how American companies allocate money. The numbers behind the surge Total nonresidential fixed investment clocked in at an annualized rate of $4.62 trillion in Q2 2026, per the BEA. The high-tech slice of that pie was dominated by three categories: information processing equipment at $794.89 billion, software at $816.63 billion, and computers and peripheral equipment at $400.63 billion. AI-related private business investment alone hit an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion, up 25% year over year. That single category of spending contributed somewhere between 25% and 33% of recent US GDP growth, depending on the analysis. Real GDP growth came in at 1.5% annualized for the quarter, according to the BEA’s second estim...