In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the US economy. Known as the Monopoly Seven, a small collection of seven large tech companies—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta/Facebook, and Tesla—produce an astounding percentage of the country’s goods and services.
These seven businesses were responsible for almost all of the economic growth in the United States in the first half of 2025, and forecasts indicate that trend will continue into 2026. Growth would have slowed to barely 0.1% each year in the absence of Big Tech. Currently, these businesses account for around one-third of the US stock market’s total value.
They now play such an important role in the economy as a whole that they influence investment choices and employment patterns. A large amount of American wealth, especially retirement savings, is reliant on their performance due to their dominance on the stock markets.
According to tech analyst Paul Kedrosky, these businesses’ increasing market share is “eating the economy,” much like monopolies and railroad barons did in the late 19th century. With such a limited, tech-focused economy, America’s future growth will be heavily reliant on the spending choices made by these seven Data Barons, a small group of businesses who have hooked the country’s economy like a parasite on their brand of surveillance capitalism.
And it is concerning. Money is being flung around like inebriated sailors on a beachside spree due to the abrupt increase in AI investment. And during the past decade, this extravagant spending has been the main driver of investment and economic expansion in the United States, generating some jobs but eliminating many others.
What if the spending abruptly stops and that investment proves to be the most recent financial bubble? If that happens, the economies of the US, Europe, and the rest of the world might collapse, just as they did after the 2008 housing bubble burst.
Is there a bubble developing in AI investment?
The major Silicon Valley firms are making significant investments, but not only in AI technologies. Additionally, they are making massive investments in server farms and massive data centers, which form the foundation of this development’s infrastructure. In 2025, Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, and Microsoft spent almost $400 billion developing artificial intelligence.
Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that big tech companies will invest about $3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028. This enormous inflow of cash is presently taking the place of conventional manufacturing and consumer spending as the primary drivers of the US economy’s growth.
What is concerning about the most recent funding rounds in AI is as follows. These businesses are instead taking on a lot of debt to pay around half of the required expenditure in order to avoid burning up their own funds. According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, major IT companies have incurred $121 billion in debt in the last 12 months, which is more than 300% more than the industry average.
Silicon Valley is assuming that the enormous new profits from the development of new AI-based goods and services will pay for all of this debt. However, there is cause for skepticism.
For instance, OpenAI, the industry leader in AI innovation, says it will invest $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure and data centers over the next eight to ten years, yet its yearly income is only $20 billion. The majority of experts concur that the rate of investment in AI infrastructure at the moment considerably outpaces any expected returns. The figures simply do not add up.
Meanwhile, there are serious concerns about the kind of debt and financing these businesses are taking on, in addition to the amount of debt. It goes by strange terms like “circular funding” and “special purpose vehicles,” which are evocative of the dubious financial activities that preceded the 2007–2008 housing boom.
For instance, Nvidia just invested $100 billion in OpenAI, a leader in the field, to finance the construction of additional data centers. After that, OpenAI is expected to utilize the funds to buy Nvidia chips for the data center.
To put it another way, Nvidia is supporting one of its largest clients by providing OpenAI with funds to purchase Nvidia processors, thereby inflating and supporting both the price and the real demand for Nvidia chips. Meta and Nvidia have a comparable $27 billion private debt agreement.
Today’s stock values are so inflated that they surpass the height of the dot-com bubble by other metrics, such as the S&P 500 price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio).
Similar to an investment casino, the AI industry has seen a massive influx of capital in a short length of time, to the extent that even Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims there are currently “irrational elements” in the investment patterns. According to Pichai, even highly capitalized Google will not be immune to the widespread harm that will result from a market crisis.
effects on the environment and high energy use
The impact on the environment is another growing worry associated with the quick development of data centers. The cooling infrastructure and backup power systems that support the thousands of servers that operate around the clock inside a data center consume a significant amount of electricity.
Prices for regular customers are rising as a result. According to Bloomberg, wholesale electricity prices in the vicinity of data centers have increased by up to 257% in recent years. According to market reports, there were over 1100 data centers in the United States as of August 2025, and almost 400 more centers were under construction.
The construction of six massive data centers requires more than one gigawatt (GW) of power, which is enough to power seventy-five thousand houses, according to Construction Review.
According to Goldman Sachs, by 2030, it will cost $1.4 trillion to construct the energy infrastructure required for AI data centers. However, the Wall Street Journal has stated that “other consumers will get stuck with the infrastructure expenditures if the AI hoopla is exaggerated or the tech industry does not eventually need as much electricity as expected.”
It will take years to determine if the quick speed of AI investment leads to a financial bubble, a revolutionary boom, or a combination of the two. The internet was a promising new technology during the 2000–2002 dot-com meltdown, but telecom corporations overinvested in internet traffic transmission infrastructure.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 7% (and 10% in the tech sector), technology stocks fell 80%, and half a million people lost their jobs. The demise of the telecom behemoth WorldCom, which at the time was the biggest bankruptcy in US history, was one of 23 telecom corporations that filed for bankruptcy.
Like a Category 5 hurricane tearing ashore, bubble failures can have disastrous and far-reaching effects. Despite a global financial crisis, the development of AI will follow the same path as the creation of the world’s internet networks.
Although it is unclear who the winners and losers will be at this stage, they will eventually emerge. Guess who, nevertheless, is drooling at the thought of being one of the major winners?
The Trump White House has put its large thumbs on the scales in a way that benefits the Trump family, which is contributing to the present AI boom. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were uninterested in, and often disparaging of, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. However, in Trump’s volatile environment, his views can shift rapidly, and AI suddenly seems like a promising family business opportunity.
Removing the Biden administration’s “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” was one of President Trump’s first moves in his second term.
Additionally, Trump ordered a review of a National Security Memo, another Biden presidential directive that governs the use of AI for national security. Trump’s AI executive order, which he released a few days later, instructed government agencies to “integrate contemporary technology” into hiring and other processes. Many worry that because of bias in the algorithms that will be used across the federal government, the order would lead to unfair AI usage.
The underlying biases, which stem from the training data utilized and reflect societal preconceptions, have already resulted in biased outcomes in loan approval, incarceration, and other sensitive judgments, as well as in hiring, promotions, and other workplace decisions.
Why, therefore, are Trump and his sons suddenly interested in and focused on AI? The Trump family has learned that “there is gold in them thar hills” in addition to wanting to use it for partisan political gain.
They have figured out how to generate billions of dollars by investing in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. Forbes claims that the Trump family’s investment in cryptocurrency and AI infrastructure represents a larger change in the family business strategy, eschewing more conventional endeavors like hotels and real estate in favor of these emerging technological fields.
Don Jr. and Eric Trump made investments in American Data Centers Inc. and American Bitcoin Corp., two new businesses that seek to develop high-performance computing infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining, just weeks after Trump relaxed the regulations imposed by the Biden administration.
The Trump family will benefit from government-supported expansion of specific AI companies, including data center expansion, thanks to this investment. According to CBS, the numerous investments made by the Trump family contributed to an initial $2.9 billion boost in their net worth in 2025. These assets currently reportedly account for approximately 40% of Trump’s personal net wealth.
The Trump White House has been infected by the poisonous Silicon Valley mentality of “move quickly and break things” and “do it now and apologize later,” which was first spearheaded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s DOGE.
With actions like the White House requiring a 10-15% equity stake from AI infrastructure companies like Intel and NVIDIA as a condition of receiving government investment subsidies from the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act (which Trump had previously criticized), Trump is upending fifty years of Republican orthodoxy.
Trump’s objective is clear: accelerate everything that can support the rapid advancement and application of AI, thereby partially nationalizing the economy. and that he may invest in it and make a magnificent profit with his friends.
Artificial Intelligence will continue to grow quickly due to the laissez-faire attitude around AI, cryptocurrency, and Silicon Valley businesses in general, as well as the president and his family’s significant financial interest in AI’s broad implementation. Nobody anticipates that the Trump administration will significantly regulate these sectors.
Companies supporting White House policies, such as Trump’s sons, would gain preferential treatment when it comes to obtaining future government contracts pertaining to the development of data centers and artificial intelligence. The Trump boys losing a large portion of their first investment was not surprising given the volatility of uncontrolled cryptocurrency and other AI ventures. Other assets are suffering, and American Bitcoin stock has fallen more than 80% from its peak in October 2025.
But if the Trump family’s assets failed, would a federal bailout be far behind, given that Daddy Trump controls the federal purse strings?
