President Trump’s tariffs aim to boost capital investment in the United States, but one sector is already making massive domestic investments without the need for tariffs. According to PPI’s analysis, the five big tech companies — Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft — are projected to invest $240 billion in U.S. capital expenditures in 2025, primarily in AI-related structures and equipment. This represents more than double their combined $110 billion U.S. capital spending in 2023 (from PPI’s most recent Investment Heroes report).
This tech investment surge dramatically overshadows domestic investment from major manufacturing industries. By comparison, in 2023, the motor vehicle industry invested just $29 billion in U.S. structures and equipment, while the primary metals industry, including steel and aluminum, invested only $15 billion.
If the U.S. wants to meaningfully increase domestic production, it should leverage our AI leadership rather than attempt a tariff-driven recreation of manufacturing’s past. Trump’s nostalgia for the old manufacturing empire isn’t the future Americans want or need.
The substantial AI investments being made now point toward a future of flexible digital manufacturing distributed across the country, creating productive capacity that can be easily shifted to meet changing consumer, business, and national security needs, and generating new jobs that will require both digital and physical skills. This vision is impeded, not accelerated, by Trump’s trade war.
It’s always easier to push on an open door. U.S companies lead in artificial intelligence, and they are showing themselves willing to put their money into this country. Democrats should champion this vision of the future.
*Note: We developed this projection using our Investment Heroes methodology, which analyzes 10K financial data to estimate U.S. capital spending as a share of global capital expenditures. For this analysis, we applied publicly available 2025 capital spending forecasts and recent earnings reports to our most recently published company estimates of domestic capital spending.
