Apr 16, 2026
Artificial intelligence is rapidly redefining our workplaces, investment portfolios, physical infrastructure, health care systems (1), brains (2), and far, far more — up to and including what it means for a country to be economically successful, if you buy into the buzz around GDI.
While we're all familiar with Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most relied-upon method for measuring a nation's economy at a glance (3), GDI is a yardstick that may be of growing interest to certain investors and forward thinkers.
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Short for Gross Domestic Intelligence, the prospective metric could indicate how well a country is primed for a tech-driven future based on its AI capabilities and potential, taking into account resources such as data centers, hardware, overall computational power and specialized intellectual capital.
And no, it's not some trending term touted by executives leading the AI boom, but rather a concept conceived in the boardrooms of top financial firms.
In a recent note to investors (4), Morgan Stanley floated the idea of GDI as something that "may well become an important investment overlay when assessing the competitiveness of entire nations and industries," building on the company's earlier prediction that 2026 will be a year in which "a nation's strategic AI capabilities will become a critical factor in assessing important geopolitical dynamics, such as trade negotiations (5)."
Could GDI really end up being that significant?
While a separate March release from Morgan Stanley stated that AI is now a crucial "macro variable" that serves as a "key driver of GDP (6)," other experts seem to have differing perspectives on its economic weight.
As TechRadar reports, Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius said early this year that, after careful examination and contrary to the headlines, AI appears to have contributed "basically zero" to U.S. GDP growth in 2025 (7).
"We don't actually view AI investment as strongly growth positive," he said in a January conversation with Atlantic Council (8), pointing out that AI equipment is, in many cases, imported — which means "there's a positive entry in the investment line, but that's offset by a negative entry in the net exports line."
Hatzius added that a good chunk of investment into the sector is classified under intermediate goods, not finished products for the sake of GDP calculation.
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"I think there's a lot of misreporting of the impact that AI investment had on U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and it's much smaller than it's often perceived," Hatzius continued.
Still, technicalities of GDP math aside, AI capacity has been growing at exponential speed alongside its rapid adoption across sectors, and the nearly $3 trillion being funnelled into data center construction worldwide over the next three years is certainly nothing to scoff at (9).
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How the US measures up at present
America has been on the cutting edge of AI expansion and development, producing nearly three times as many AI models as China in 2024 and hosting 10 times more AI data centers than any other country as of 2025 (10), along with leading in AI investment, according to stats from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI (11).
But, the same studies indicate that China is catching up, with the performance gap between U.S. and Chinese AI models now "effectively closed," the institute says.
Morgan Stanley also noted in a February report how close the two countries have become in respect to AI thought leadership (5), with researchers at Chinese universities outpacing their American counterparts in publications and citations (11).
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
ScienceDirect (1); Time (2); Investopedia (3); Business Insider (4); Morgan Stanley (5),(6); TechRadar (7); YouTube (8); Apollo (9); Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (10),(11)
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Becky Robertson is a senior staff reporter with Moneywise and a lifelong writer. Along with years in the journalism industry at outlets such as blogTO and Quill & Quire, she's participated in writing residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and Writing Workshops Paris. With 33 countries visited and counting, she finds travel to be one of her greatest inspirations.
