The Peterson Institute calls it “regulatory instability masquerading as economic strategy.”
Factories paused expansion. Supply chains froze. Capital budgets shrank.
And paradoxically, the AI boom masked all of it.
Without AI-related capex, business investment would likely be in outright contraction.
That’s not political framing. That’s the IMF’s own caution.
Two tugs.
One backward. One forward.
One clouding the other.
In the Prince William hearing room, the council members stared at the map again. Loudoun County—just up the road—already hosts the world’s densest cluster of data centers. WIRED described the skyline as “a thicket of windowless fortresses humming with servers.” Residents have filed noise complaints that read like diary entries: low-frequency rumble, constant vibration, the sense of pressure on your chest even with the windows closed. One man told Bloomberg, “It never stops. Even inside the house.”
That is hum as fact, not metaphor.
But in the Beltway several miles away, the Fed was trying to downplay comparisons to 1999. Powell said today’s AI giants have real earnings. Jefferson said leverage is contained. Analysts at BlackRock and FactSet pointed to real year-over-year revenue growth among the Mag7. And yet the Bank of England warned that U.S. tech valuations now look “comparable to the dot-com peak.” Albert Edwards scoffed into microphones, insisting Americans were “turning a deaf ear to warnings because they’re making too much money.”
Two sets of facts.
Two stories.
One hum underneath both.
Because the real conflict isn’t between optimism and pessimism. It’s between a boom that accelerates faster than the grid can bear and a tariff regime that squeezes the industries that depend on that grid. The public sees only the bills. The markets see only the charts. Each blinds the other.
And that is how misperception becomes policy.
When the Prince William supervisors finally approved the Digital Gateway rezoning after midnight, the room erupted. Some people cheered. Some shouted betrayal. Reporters typed until their fingers shook. The hum outside the building was louder than it had been at sunset.
By dawn, Wall Street had already moved on.
The Mag7 rose again on the strength of a phrase about inflation “easing meaningfully.”
Not a policy change. Not a shift in fundamentals.
A phrase.