A $30 trillion gamble and global diffusion, the polarized narrative of AI in 2026

After reviewing the 2026 trend outlook reports from 5 top institutions: a16z, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock, two valuable insights were distilled:

1) What bubble are we talking about? Will the AI industry enter a period of accelerated investment?

Morgan Stanley has provided an astonishing figure: capital expenditures on AI infrastructure are expected to reach $3 trillion, with less than 20% currently deployed.

What concept? Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, these super large-scale cloud vendors, are now frantically spending money to build data centers, buy GPUs, and lay down power infrastructure, but this is just the beginning.

However, JPMorgan has given a calm assessment of the actual benefits brought by the large-scale adoption of AI, believing that in the short term it can only boost profits for some companies and help giants optimize their profit narratives. To truly achieve a substantial transformation in AI productivity, many more years are needed.

In fact, it just pointed out one thing: 2026 will still be a year of crazy spending on AI, but it is still just the investment phase and far from the harvest moment.

2) Which side do you stand on regarding the concentration dividend of U.S. stocks and the spillover to non-U.S. markets?

BlackRock has proposed a concept called “Micro is Macro”, believing that the AI investments of a few companies already have macro-level influence.

From the data, as of YTD 2025, the equal-weighted S&P 500 in the US stock market has only increased by 3%, while the market-cap-weighted version of top tech companies has risen by 11%. This 8% gap may be attributed to the concentrated benefits of AI.

In this regard, Morgan Stanley is the most aggressive, directly setting a target of 7,800 points for the S&P 500, which represents a 14% increase from the current level, based on the reasoning that the profitability of the seven tech giants will continue to strengthen.

However, JPMorgan believes that as the dollar weakens, the AI dividend will spill over into the global supply chain, resulting in an expected annual return of 10.9% for emerging markets, which is higher than the 6.7% for U.S. large-cap stocks. Goldman Sachs also supports the spillover perspective, giving emerging markets the same expected return of 10.9%, suggesting that Europe at 7.1% and Japan at 8.2% also have opportunities.

In simple terms, these are two completely different bets: BlackRock and Morgan Stanley bet that the AI dividend will be continuously monopolized by American tech giants, while JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs bet that AI is a global infrastructure upgrade, and the dividends will spread to non-American markets globally.