AI's $600 Billion Appetite Leaves Venture Capital Starved for Everything Else

Artificial intelligence investment has surged to $600 billion annually—roughly 2 percent of U.S. GDP—commanding 81 percent of venture capital funding in early 2026, a concentration that economists say is sucking capital from energy, biotech, climate technology, and traditional enterprise software. The shift reflects the unprecedented scale and urgency of building foundational AI models and the data centers that support them, fundamentally reshaping how capital flows across the economy.