AI spending is boosting the economy, but many businesses are in survival mode
Cameron Pappas, owner of Norton’s Florist
Norton’s
For Cameron Pappas, owner of Norton’s Florist in Birmingham, Alabama, the artificial intelligence boom is a world away.
While companies like Nvidia, Alphabet and Broadcom are lifting the stock market to fresh highs and bolstering GDP, Pappas is experiencing what’s happening in the real economy, one that’s far removed from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Small businesses like Norton’s, and companies of all sizes in retail, construction and hospitality, are struggling from higher costs brought by the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs, and as downbeat consumers reduce their spending.
“We’ve just got an eagle eye on all of our costs,” Pappas, 36, told CNBC in an interview.
Norton’s generated $4 million in revenue last year, selling flowers, plants and gifts to locals. To avoid raising prices, which could cause customers to flee, Pappas has been forced to get creative, reworking some of his designs.
“If a bouquet has 25 stems in it, if you reduce that by three to four stems, then you’re able to keep the price the same,” Pappas said. “It’s really forced us to focus on that and to make sure that we’re pricing things the best that we possibly can.”
Pappas’ story and many like it are being masked in the macro data by the power of AI. In the first half of the year, AI-related capital expenditures contributed to 1.1% of GDP growth, according to a September report from JPMorgan Chase. That spending outpaced the U.S. consumer “as an engine of expansion,” the report said.
Total U.S. GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.8% during the second quarter of 2025 after falling 0.5% in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said.
U.S. manufacturing spending has contracted for seven straight months, according to the Institute for Supply Management. And construction spending has been flat to down, due to high interest rates and rising costs. Cushman & Wakefield said in a report this month that total project costs for construction in the fourth quarter will be up 4.6% from a year earlier because of tariffs on building materials.
The stock market shows a similar disconnect between AI and everybody else.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote for the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) at the SAP Center in San Jose, California, U.S. March 18, 2025.
Brittany Hosea-Small | Reuters
Eight tech companies are valued at $1 trillion or more and, to varying degrees, are all tied to AI. Those companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Broadcom — make up about 37% of the S&P 500. Nvidia, with a $4.5 trillion market cap, accounts for over 7% of the benchmark’s value by itself.
Investors are giddy about the massive investments they’re seeing in AI infrastructure. Broadcom shares are up more than 50% this year after more than doubling in each of the prior two years, while Nvidia and Alphabet have jumped almost 40% in 2025.
That explains why the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are up 15% and 20%, respectively, reaching record highs on Friday, even as the government shutdown continues to cause economic angst.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 subgroups that include consumer discretionary and consumer staples companies have increased by less than 5% year to date.
The latest troubling sign in the consumer market came on Thursday, when Target said it’s cutting 1,800 corporate jobs — the retailer’s first major round of layoffs in a decade. Target shares have plunged 30% this year.
“I think the message that the AI economy is sort of driving up the GDP numbers is a correct one,” Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told CNBC in an interview. “There may be weakness in the rest of the economy, or not weakness, but there may be more modest growth.”
Investors will hear all about AI in the coming days, the busiest stretch of the quarter for tech earnings, and will be listening closely for additional guidance on capital expenditures. Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet report on Wednesday, followed by Apple and Amazon on Thursday.
Nvidia’s stock over the last year.
Last month, Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI, a startup valued at $500 billion. The capital will help OpenAI deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, which is roughly equivalent to the annual power consumption of 8 million U.S. households.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices have doubled this year and soared more than 20% earlier this month after the chipmaker announced a deal with OpenAI, while Oracle has been on a tear of late due to its ties to OpenAI and the broader infrastructure buildouts.
“Are we sort of inflating the economy now, thereby setting ourselves up for a crash in the future?” Sundararajan said. He added that he’s not seeing signs that demand for AI infrastructure will slow anytime soon.
‘Tariff price management’
When it comes to local businesses, most only know about the AI gold rush from the news headlines. One in four small business owners are stuck in “survival mode” as they contend with challenges like rising costs and tariffs, according to a September KeyBank Survey. It’s a segment of the economy that routinely accounts for about 40% of the nation’s GDP.
Pappas’ flower shop was founded in 1921, and purchased by his dad in 2002. The business has survived the Great Depression, World War II and the Covid pandemic. Pappas said his father, who died in 2022, reminded him that these periods were “just another season” for Norton’s, and that such challenges come with the territory.
But Trump’s tariffs have created a whole new set of constraints, as roughly 80% of all cut flowers in the U.S. are imported from countries like Colombia and Ecuador, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
There’s no way for Norton’s to avoid higher import costs, but Pappas said he’s started buying some flowers directly from South American growers, which saves him money versus going through distributors that charge extra.
Pappas said it’s part of his “tariff price management” effort.
Trump’s tariffs will cost global businesses more than $1.2 trillion this year, and most of those costs are being passed onto consumers, according to S&P Global.
With the holiday season rapidly approaching, consumer sentiment is of particular importance. The picture is bleak.
The majority of U.S. consumers, 57%, that responded to a Deloitte survey published this month said they expect the economy to weaken in the year ahead, up from 30% a year ago. It’s the most negative outlook since the consulting firm began tracking sentiment in 1997.
Gen Z consumers, which the survey defined as ages 18 to 28, said they plan to spend an average of 34% less this holiday season compared to last year. Millennials, those between 29 and 44, said they expect to spend an average of 13% less this holiday season.
Additionally, seasonal hiring in the retail industry is poised to fall to its lowest level since the 2009 recession, according to a September report from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The firm released another report earlier this month that showed new hiring in the U.S. has totaled just under 205,000 so far this year, off 58% from the same period last year.
The Starbucks logo is displayed in the window of a Starbucks Coffee shop on Sept. 25, 2025 in San Francisco, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Starbucks announced a $1 billion restructuring plan in September that involves closing several stores in North America. Around 900 nonretail employees were laid off as part of the plan, and the company let go of another 1,100 corporate workers earlier this year.
Starbucks shares are down about 6% this year.
Shares of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts slumped on Thursday after the hotel chain issued disappointing third-quarter results. CEO Geoff Ballotti cited a “challenging macro backdrop” in the company’s earnings release. The stock is down roughly 25% year to date.
Even in parts of the tech industry that have benefited the most from the AI boom, companies have been conducting layoffs. Microsoft announced plans to cut around 9,000 jobs in July, which the company partly attributed to reducing layers of management. Salesforce is one of a number of tech companies that have announced layoffs, saying that AI can now handle the work.
But Hatim Rahman, an associate professor specializing in AI at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said that most businesses using AI for efficiencies won’t find them right away. So companies can’t count on the technology to counter declining revenue and, Rahman said, “the road to the future is going to be bumpy.”
“AI is not a plug-and-play solution,” Rahman said. “For many organizations, it’s going to involve engagement with people, processes, culture, tools to be able to reap the benefits. And in the aggregate, it’s going to take time.”
WATCH: The AI boom is lifting the stock market, but it may be masking a weaker economy
Chinese EV company Xpeng showed off its newest humanoid robot in Guangzhou on Nov. 5, 2025.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
Guangzhou, CHINA — Chinese electric car company Xpeng plans to launch robotaxis next year after previously claiming it wouldn’t be a real business in the near future and took the wraps off of its latest humanoid robot model.
Xpeng’s technology push mirrors one of its key rivals Tesla, as the Guangzhou, China-headquartered company looks to position itself as more than just an electric car firm.
The automaker announced on Wednesday as part of its “AI Day” that it is launching three robotaxi models. The vehicles will use four of Xpeng’s self-developed “Turing” AI chips. Xpeng claims the chips represent the combined highest in-car computing power in the world, at 3,000 TOPS, an industry measure.
The semiconductors power Xpeng’s “vision-language-action (VLA)” model, now in its second iteration. This type of AI models take into account inputs like visual cues that can help with applications like driverless cars or robotics.
Alibaba announced Wednesday that it is partnering with Xpeng on robotaxis through the e-commerce company’s digital mapping subsidiary AutoNavi and Amaps app, which also includes a ride-hailing portal.
The Xpeng robotaxi includes an external display of speed and other information on the vehicle’s sun visors.
Xpeng said it plans to start testing robotaxis in Guangzhou and other Chinese cities next year.
Co-president Brian Gu told CNBC last week that robotaxis will “ultimately be a global phenomenon” but that it would take time to get there, especially given regulation. Back in April 2024, he cautioned that self-driving taxis wouldn’t become a significant business for at least five years.
During a group interview with reporters on Wednesday, Gu addressed his change in tone from last year toward robotaxis.
“The tech is happening faster than we anticipated,” Gu said.
He noted that the AI developments and the significant increase in computing power “give us the confidence we are near the inflection point” for robotaxis.
Xpeng’s strategy for robotaxis is to make two categories of cars: one for commercial self-driving shared vehicles, and another for fully autonomous personal cars that may be only shared among family members.
Xpeng’s robotaxi announcements come as Chinese players such as Pony.ai, WeRide and Baidu have ramped up global expansion plans after rolling out self-driving taxis to the public in parts of China. Tesla this year launched its long-awaited robotaxi program in parts of Texas.
Humanoid robot
Similar to Tesla’s push into humanoid robots, Xpeng on Wednesday announced its own version, the second-generation Iron robot. The Chinese company plans to begin mass production of the robots next year.
During a presentation on Wednesday, CEO He Xiaopeng downplayed the likelihood that the humanoids will soon be usable in households, and said it was too costly to use them in factories given the low price of labor in China. Instead, he said the robots will first be used as tour guides, sales assistants and office building guides, beginning in Xpeng facilities.
He said that he doesn’t know how many robots Xpeng will sell in the next 10 years, but it will be more than the number of cars.
The humanoid robot uses three of Xpeng’s Turing AI chips and a solid-state battery, with plans for customization options for aspects of the product like body shape and hair style.
Xiaopeng He, CEO of Xpeng, showed off the company’s plan for robotaxis at an event in Guangzhou, China, on Nov. 5, 2025.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
Xpeng Co-President Gu said on Wednesday that the company has been developing some technology before Tesla but has not been as vocal in promoting it.
“What we are pursuing from a tech and product perspective, there are some similarities with Tesla…There are some areas that we probably started earlier than Tesla,” Gu said, referring to flying cars and humanoid robots.
Xpeng has developed a flying car product.
But Gu acknowledged that Tesla has done a better and more high-profile job at sharing its commercialization plans, which Xpeng has not done as much until today.
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