We Are In A War-Time Economy. That’s Bullish.

We’ve spent the last few weeks in this newsletter walking through the Trump administration’s critical minerals push. Presidential attendance at the mining roundtable. Billions in Department of War (DoW) and Development Finance Corporation (DFC) deals. The Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law, being invoked to fast-track domestic mineral production outside the normal legislative process.

To be clear, I’ve been calling this a war-time economy playbook. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

Here’s the piece that ties it all together: this isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening at the exact same moment the largest companies in America are engaged in the biggest capital spending race in the history of the digital economy. And the two are feeding off each other in a way that explains why this economy keeps growing and why stocks keep grinding to new highs no matter how many reasons the skeptics find to call a top.

Start with the AI buildout itself. The top five hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle, are tracking above $600 billion in combined capex for 2026 alone, up from roughly $360 billion in 2025. BlackRock projects the broader AI infrastructure cycle will top $2.2 TRILLION by 2028. And this spending is not some abstract data point being pushed by hyperscaler CEOs to justify raising capital. It’s doing real, measurable work on the topline of the American economy. AI-related capex alone is on track to add roughly 2.5 percentage points to U.S. GDP growth this year. In the first quarter, AI capex accounted for an estimated 75% of ALL U.S. economic growth.