The AI boom is singlehandedly carrying the U.S. import market—and adding $200 billion to the trade deficit, Fed study finds

When President Donald Trump returned to office last year, he framed his tariff policy as a bid to bring manufacturing of strategic materials and equipment back to U.S. More than a year later, his sweeping trade agenda has indeed forced a crackdown on imports, so much so that a single technological force has grown into the primary engine of the country’s trade economy. The AI boom has been the undisputed hotspot of the U.S. economy during the past year. While the technology itself has yet to translate into significant productivity or employment gains, investment in the infrastructure and computing power that has enabled AI’s rollout has been massive. AI-related private investment in the U.S. last year hit $286 billion, according to Stanford University’s AI index report , around the same as the lifetime cost of the entire Apollo program in today’s dollars. Infrastructure and research costs accounted for more than $140 billion of that sum, with a large chunk earmarked to build the massive data centers that have been powering the AI boom. That splurge has required enormous amounts of raw construction materials, not all of which can be cheaply sourced in the U.S. The AI boom, in fact, is one of the only factors keeping U.S. import growth in positive territory. A league of its own AI-related products accounted for 23% of all U.S. imports last year, according to a study published earlier this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Those products include the technical stuff—storage hardware, graphic processing units, and the like. But data centers are buildings first and foremost, and the construction frenzy has led to surging demand for cooling, heating, and ventilation equipment. Taken together, imports of AI-related products have grown 73% since 2023, while imports of non-AI-related products have risen only 3% over the same period, the study found. The findings suggest that despite the Trump administration’s tariff pressure— designed in part to bring the AI s…