The AI boom is powering the world economy, helping it weather the impact of the war in the Middle East and its impact on trade, the head of the IMF argued. Though the conflict has cooled growth somewhat — the IMF revised its 2026 global forecast down 0.5 percentage points — massive AI spending worldwide has helped cushion the impact.
Despite investors’ concerns of a bubble, frontier labs remain steadfast on the market’s potential: Anthropic recently upped its estimate for AI’s total addressable market to $30 trillion, roughly equivalent to the size of the US economy. The boom has in turn pushed companies to IPO, including Chinese champion DeepSeek, which the South China Morning Post reported is eyeing a 2027 debut.
