IMF chief says AI investment is helping keep global growth near 3%

AI infrastructure spending is helping sustain global economic growth at around 3%, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in Bangkok on October 12. Speaking at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings, she cast the investment boom as a force supporting expansion despite an energy supply shock dragging the economy down.

Georgieva described the boom as a “demand shock, an investment shock.” Her assessment puts spending on the infrastructure behind AI at the center of its economic contribution: investment itself is supporting growth, while economies supplying the hardware are benefiting from the demand.

The two shocks point in opposite directions in her account. AI investment is shifting the economy into a higher gear; the energy supply shock is holding it back. The roughly 3% growth figure describes the world economy’s expansion with those forces at work, not the amount of growth generated by AI alone.

The potential lift to Asian growth

Advanced Asian economiespercentage points

0.51

Georgieva said the AI investment boom could add between half and one full percentage point to growth in advanced regional economies.

Emerging Asian economiespercentage points

0.20.8

She put the possible growth boost for emerging Asian economies at between 0.2 and 0.8 percentage point.

Georgieva singled out Asian economies that supply AI hardware as beneficiaries, naming Thailand as an example. That identifies a concrete route through which the investment boom reaches the region: demand for the equipment used in AI infrastructure, rather than only activity inside the companies developing AI.

Her regional estimates describe possible additions to growth, not total growth rates for either group of economies. They also distinguish advanced from emerging Asian economies rather than assigning one uniform benefit across the region. The advanced-economy range starts and ends higher, although the two ranges overlap.