Visa report: AI infrastructure boom underpins 2.7% global growth in 2026

Visa’s economic outlook frames AI not as a niche tech story but as a macro driver of capital expenditure and productivity. The headline growth number—2.7% global GDP in 2026—sounds ordinary, but the composition is telling: slower consumer spending, faster business investment, with a significant share of that capex going into AI infrastructure, data centers and automation projects. That means more money flowing into the compute, networking and software layers that advanced AI depends on.

The report’s observation that small businesses adopting AI are growing transactions faster than peers is particularly important. It suggests AI isn’t confined to Big Tech or Fortune 500 pilots; it’s diffusing into the long tail of the economy. Those deployments are typically more pragmatic—think invoicing, fraud detection, marketing copy, and customer support—and they create broad political and commercial constituencies that benefit from AI. That, in turn, can blunt backlash and support continued investment in more capable systems.

For the AGI race, the implication is that the “demand side” looks durable. Even if frontier model performance gains slow, there’s a large backlog of mundane but valuable tasks to automate. As long as that automation continues to show ROI, firms will keep funding the infrastructure and tooling improvements that make it possible, indirectly subsidizing the research and compute platforms that AGI work sits on.