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Capital expenditure on AI is feeding into areas of the economy well beyond the companies developing the technology
Capital expenditure on AI is feeding into areas of the economy well beyond the companies developing the technology Bill Gates warned that the world is unprepared for the upheaval AI could bring, including in the labour market.
Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Imagesin a much-discussed 6,000-word essay that the world is unprepared for the upheaval AI could bring, including the prospect of machines permanently replacing large numbers of jobs. Investors are taking a more optimistic view, with the most notable development being that the market’s AI story is no longer simply about a handful of giant technology companies.
Data from S&P Dow Jones Indices shows more than 60 per cent ofThe equal-weighted S&P 500, which gives the same weighting to each company rather than favouring the largest, also beat the conventional index in both months and has outperformed it in 2026. How ICG’s push to close €1.2bn buyout in August’s holiday lull backfiredIndeed, until this week’s results sent it higher, Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company and the poster child for the AI trade – had actually underperformed the S&P 500 over the previous year.
The figures point to a broadening of performance, with indices no longer driven solely by the mega-cap technology giants. Roughly 85 per cent of S&P 500 companies beat earnings estimates in the second quarter. All but one of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors have reported earnings growth over the last year, and nine of the 11 sectors have reported double-digit earnings growth.
Various factors underpin this growth, but the scale of spending on AI is an obvious one, with capital expenditure feeding into areas of the economy well beyond the companies developing the technology. FactSet says the term “AI” was cited on 305 S&P 500 earnings calls in the second quarter, suggesting how widely the technology is now featuring in corporate thinking.
Valuation expert Prof Aswath Damodaran points to Airbnb and on-demand delivery company DoorDash as examples of businesses that emerged from the infrastructure created by the smartphone revolution. His point is that if AI develops in a similar way, some of its eventual beneficiaries will be companies that are difficult to identify today. For now, investors seem less concerned about the disruption Gates fears than about where the benefits might show up next.
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