By Eliot Brown

Corporations and countries have made pledges this year of over $6 trillion in U.S. investment. The reality isn't so mega-sized, economic analysts at Goldman Sachs concluded in a note to clients Friday.

In all, they estimated that specific announced projects would add between $30 billion and $135 billion annually to the gross domestic product for the next few years. Taken with an estimated $50 billion a year of extra foreign purchases of U.S. goods, they said, "such increases would fall well short of the recent headlines."

The bulk of companies with big announcements have mostly repackaged existing plans. And countries promising giant investment levels - the White House says Saudi Arabia will spend $600 billion in the U.S.- haven't identified anywhere close to the level of specifics to meet those numbers.

The Goldman note, by Joseph Briggs and Sarah Dong, found "near zero correlation" between the huge surge in investment commitments by companies -SoftBank, IBM and TSMC have made giant pledges-and analysts' estimates of companies' spending.

Several of the big corporate pledges "imply implausibly large increases" in spending, the analysts wrote.

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May 16, 2025 11:04 ET (15:04 GMT)

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