The U.S. economy grew faster in the second quarter of the year than previously estimated. The Commerce Department said today gross domestic product from April through June grew at a revised 3.3%.

Better than the 3% officials estimated last month. Revisions are standard business with GDP as more complete data becomes available. The fine print is pretty interesting on this one, though.

There is a saying that neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night will stop an American Express offer from getting in a mailbox.

But economic data doesn’t work like that. When a massive storm hits the Gulf Coast or a polar vortex freezes the Midwest, jobs numbers or retail sales may be misleading, and after April 2, Hurricane Tariff-palooza made landfall.

“It would be like another storm of sorts, and it certainly had an impact on GDP without any question,” said Charles Lieberman, chief investment officer with Advisors Capital Management. “And it's visible. You can see how much imports were distorted.”

The twist here is the way GDP is calculated — GDP is the final value of goods and services produced in the U.S. — imports are subtracted from that.

So, when tariffs hit and imports were cut by about $340 billion dollars last quarter, GDP went up, although that doesn't mean the economy was booming.

“So, these are just massive massive numbers that overwhelm everything else and you have to cut through that noise to get a sense of what’s going on underneath the economy,” Lieberman said.

Focusing solely on what consumers and businesses were buying this spring, GDP was still growing, but not as robustly as last year.

“That suggests to us that you know that there's clear signs on an underlying slowdown,” said Brian Coulton at Fitch Ratings.

GDP has found a partial replacement though for that somewhat slowing consumer: AI. Or more specifically, big tech firms spending hundreds of billions on AI data centers.

There are seeing signs that investment in AI and investment in the construction of AI-related infrastructure is providing a significant boost to economic activity,” said Gregory Daco, an economist with EY.

Daco says he expects that AI spending to continue to boost GDP well into next year.