Questions readers have asked about these pages: what the terms mean, where the numbers come from, and the places where an honest answer needs a slider rather than a sentence.
No. The Bank for International Settlements (the BIS, a bank owned by the world's central banks) uses the IMF's grouping. It splits the world into advanced economies and emerging market economies, and China is in the second group, as its largest member. The report's own text discusses China's growth under the emerging-market heading, and every one of its cross-country charts lists China on that side. The advanced bloc is the United States, the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, Korea, Australia and the other rich economies. Together they produce roughly $60T of GDP a year.
That matters for every number on the main page built from this baseline. The $36T pool of wages (all the pay earned by the bloc's workers), the white-collar wage pool on the §4 slider, and the growth dial in §6 all describe the advanced bloc only. Chinese wages are not in the pool that AI revenue would have to draw from, and Chinese growth does not move the dial.
Just under half of the advanced bloc's GDP is American: about $30T of roughly $62T at market prices, and a little less when countries are weighted by purchasing power (what money buys locally), as the BIS does when it adds them up. So the bloc's growth rate is close to a simple average of the US and everyone else. Any target for the bloc as a whole quietly sets a target for US growth. The rule of thumb: each extra percentage point of US growth moves the bloc's growth rate by roughly half a point.
A worked example: if the rest of the bloc grows at 2.25% and the whole bloc is to reach 2.5%, the US must grow at roughly 2.8%. That is more than half a point faster than the others, and slightly more than half of all the bloc's growth. Drag the sliders to change the assumptions:
The arithmetic behind the sliders: bloc growth = US share × US growth + rest share × rest growth. So the US growth needed = rest growth + (target − rest growth) ÷ US share. The share range of 40–55% runs from the purchasing-power measure of the US share to the market-price measure.
This has an uncomfortable consequence for the main page's §6 dial, whose horizontal axis is this same bloc-wide growth rate. At the default settings, the 3.2% point at which wages keep pace needs US growth of roughly 4.3%, kept up for fifteen years. The tempting 3.5% bloc rate needs the US near 4.9%. The US last kept up rates like that in the boom of the late 1990s. The dial treats the bloc as one economy. Split it into its parts, and its optimistic zones assume America carries everyone else.
Where the numbers stand (as of 31 July 2026). The IMF's July 2026 outlook puts advanced-economy growth at roughly 1.8% for 2026: the US at 2.3%, the euro area at 1.2%. The latest quarters came in weak. The US grew +1.5% at an annual rate in Q2 2026 (after +2.1% in Q1), and the euro area grew +0.4% on the previous quarter (+1.0% on a year earlier). Set that against the dial: today's bloc-wide rate sits below the dial's entire axis, under even its 2% "historical trend" anchor. Set the sliders to today's mix, with the rest of the bloc near 1.4%, and keeping wages on pace needs the US to sustain growth of roughly 5%, against the 1.5% it just reported. The main page's §6 carries a decade-long reality-check chart of exactly this split.
The reference model is the Bank for International Settlements' Annual Economic Report 2026. Chapter I ("Progress and peril") documents the trillion-dollar building programme of the five biggest AI builders the BIS names (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle) and how it is paid for. Box C ("Transformative AI, long-term growth and r-star") models what the economy looks like if the bet pays off and AI does the work that people used to be paid for. The framing, the bet as a wager on replacing white-collar wages, follows Adam Tooze's Chartbook 456, which read the BIS report the way this site does.
The site began with a simple frustration. The arithmetic that links the headlines about capital spending (money spent on things that last for years: chips, buildings, power) to what is at stake for jobs and wages rarely appears on one screen. So this site walks through it from end to end: from capital spending to the revenue it must earn every year to pay for itself, from that revenue to the wage pool it would have to come out of, from the wage pool to jobs, and from jobs to growth and to workers' share of income. Every assumption a reader might dispute is on a slider, and every number that carries weight is traced in a published ledger of derivations, which a script checks each time the site is published. Reported results come from public filings, captured by the pipeline behind Geo-V.eu, a sister project. Built and maintained by RAAK.work. The page is updated after each set of results on the watch list, and every revision is dated in the revision history on the main page.
Some are. Most, deliberately, are not, and the ledger says which is which. Taken directly from the BIS: the five companies, the trillion dollars spent in 2025–26, the window and range of capital spending the companies have committed to, the dating of the boom from 2023, the Box C scenarios (including the share of national income that goes to workers as pay falling toward 20% by 2060), and the twist in which demand runs out because workers who lose wages stop buying. Built by this page: the §2 revenue floor (the revenue the AI spending must earn every year to pay for itself), the §4 capture-rate arithmetic (the AI company's share of the wage saving it produces for a customer), the §6 dial showing what is left for workers, the charts on the tracking page, and §5's diagram of the loop. The BIS tests something different from the floor: net economic surplus, meaning revenue minus capital spending and interest on debt, inside a calibrated model that includes how the spending is financed. And the BIS defines the loop (firms in the boom investing in, buying from and selling to each other, so one firm's spending is another's revenue) but draws no picture of it. The arrows in §5's diagram are put together from disclosed and press-reported figures, each labelled as one or the other.
Where a construction departs from the report, the departure is named on the page and justified in the ledger. That includes the floor's biggest limitation: it is static, while the BIS models a financed system in which a shortfall makes itself worse. One boundary is worth stating plainly: the model is the BIS's five and stays that way. SpaceX listed on the stock market in June and now spends $2.35 of capital for every dollar of revenue. It appears beside the five as evidence and never inside the required revenue ramp, the gap chart’s five-way split or the capital spending total.
The results figures come from company filings and press releases: 8-K filings to the US securities regulator, quarterly results releases, and the companies' own guidances. An automated pipeline captures them within hours of each set of results. Nothing comes from memory or from estimates. When a figure is not published, the page says so rather than filling the blank. Microsoft no longer states its AI revenue at an annual rate; Meta reports no AI revenue line at all. Every constant that carries weight, every model input, and every known bias is documented in the derivations ledger. The ledger classifies each number as taken from the BIS, built by the page (arithmetic shown), or a named departure from the BIS (with the reason given). A script compares the ledger's register of constants with the page each time the site is published. A number that drifts from its documentation cannot go live.
Because no company reports "AI revenue" in dollars that can be audited, and inventing a split would break the site's first rule. So the chart shows two honest extremes and lets you switch between them. The upper-limit reading counts all revenue growth since 2023 (the low point from which the BIS dates the boom) as AI revenue. That overstates it, because it includes growth in retail, advertising and ordinary cloud business. The trend-adjusted reading subtracts each company's own growth pace from before the boom and keeps only what is left over. That understates it, because the years the trend is taken from were themselves lifted by rebounds and acquisitions. The true figure, which no one can observe, sits between the two readings, and the verdict sentence under the chart changes to match.
The model's five companies are the five the BIS names as the spenders: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle. Apple is left out on purpose. Its capital spending of roughly $11B a year is a rounding error beside the roughly $840B the five have said they will spend in 2026, and that makes Apple the bet's control group: it sells into the same economy, but has made no wager. Nvidia is the supplier the five's capital spending flows to, so its results are a thermometer for the spending side, not a bet of its own. The AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI) appear as evidence about future revenue. Every row outside the model says so in the row itself, and none of them feeds the charts.
The page's sharpest test is a gap opening between two sets of records: company revenue and payroll data. If AI revenue is truly substitution revenue, money that used to be paid as wages, it must eventually show up in the payroll data. Run the §4 arithmetic backwards: if today's AI revenue were drawn from wages, tens of millions of jobs' worth of pay would already be visibly missing from the employment statistics. They are not, which proves that today's revenue still comes from IT budgets and the loop (firms in the boom buying from and investing in each other). Around 2027–28 the required revenue ramp passes what software budgets can plausibly supply. From that point, revenue staying on schedule and payrolls staying quiet cannot both go on. One of them gives. Meanwhile the depreciation wall (most of the hardware must be replaced within roughly five years) forces the funding question by about 2028 whatever else happens. Failure looks like the revenue line breaking first; "success" looks like the jobs column breaking instead. The watch list dates every reading.
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No. Every model here is deliberately simple and built to get the order of magnitude right, so that its assumptions can be inspected. It is the opposite of a forecast. The site exists so that a reader can disagree with a specific number, drag it, and see what follows. Nothing on these pages is a recommendation to buy or sell anything.