After reviewing the 2026 trend outlook reports from five top institutions—a16z, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock—two key insights have been distilled:
1) Forget the Bubble, the AI Industry is Entering an Accelerated Investment Phase
Morgan Stanley provided a staggering figure: AI infrastructure capital expenditure is projected to reach $3 trillion, with less than 20% currently deployed.
What does this mean? Hyperscale cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are pouring massive investments into building data centers, purchasing GPUs, and expanding power infrastructure—but this is just the beginning.
However, J.P. Morgan offered a more cautious perspective on the actual benefits of widespread AI adoption, suggesting that it will only boost profits for some companies in the short term, helping giants optimize their earnings narrative. Achieving the transformative productivity gains from AI will take many more years.
In essence, 2026 will be another year of frenzied spending on AI, but it remains an investment phase, far from the harvest season.
2) U.S. Stock Concentration Dividends vs. Spillover to Non-U.S. Markets: Which Side Are You On?
BlackRock introduced the concept of “Micro is Macro,” arguing that the AI investments of a few companies already have macro-level impact.
Data shows that year-to-date in 2025, the equal-weighted S&P 500 has risen only 3%, while the market-cap-weighted version of top tech companies has surged 11%. This 8% gap may be attributed to the concentration of AI dividends.
On this front, Morgan Stanley is the most aggressive, setting a target of 7800 points for the S&P 500—a 14% increase from current levels—based on the sustained strengthening of the profitability of the tech giants.
However, J.P. Morgan believes that as the U.S. dollar weakens, AI dividends will spill over into global supply chains, projecting an annualized return of 10.9% for emerging markets, higher than the 6.7% for U.S. large-cap stocks. Goldman Sachs also sides with the spillover effect, giving emerging markets the same 10.9% projection and suggesting opportunities in Europe (7.1%) and Japan (8.2%).
Simply put, these are two entirely different bets: BlackRock and Morgan Stanley are betting that AI dividends will continue to be monopolized by U.S. tech giants, while J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs are wagering that AI is a global infrastructure upgrade, with benefits diffusing to non-U.S. markets worldwide.
