AI investment market predictions from institutional giants are polarized; is it too early to say there's a bubble?

Author: Haotian; Source: X, @tmel0211

After reviewing the 2026 trend outlook reports from five top institutions—a16z, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock—I extracted two key value points:

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

Morgan Stanley gave a startling figure: AI infrastructure capital expenditure is projected to reach $3 trillion, with current deployment less than 20%.

What does this mean? Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and other hyperscale cloud providers are currently spending heavily on building data centers, buying GPUs, and laying power infrastructure, but this is just the beginning.

However, JPMorgan Chase offered a sober assessment of the actual benefits of this large-scale adoption of AI, believing that in the short term it can only boost the profits of some companies and help giants optimize their profitability. The real benefits of a qualitative leap in AI productivity will take many years to materialize. Essentially, it points to one thing: 2026 will still be a year of frantic AI spending, but it's still just the investment phase, far from the harvest. 2) US stock market concentration dividends and non-US market spillover: which side are you on? BlackRock proposed a concept called "Micro is Macro," arguing that the AI ​​investments of a few companies already have a macroeconomic impact. Looking at the data, by 2025 (YTD), the equal-weighted S&P 500 in the US stock market will only rise by 3%, but the market capitalization-weighted version of leading technology companies will rise by 11%. This 8% difference may be due to the concentration of AI dividends. Morgan Stanley is the most aggressive in this regard, setting a target of 7800 points for the S&P 500, representing a 14% increase from the current level, based on the continued strengthening of the profitability of the seven major tech companies. However, JPMorgan Chase believes that as the dollar weakens, the AI ​​dividend will spill over into the global supply chain, thus giving emerging markets a 10.9% annualized expected return, higher than the 6.7% for US large-cap stocks. Goldman Sachs also sides with the spillover effect, giving emerging markets the same 10.9% expectation, believing that Europe (7.1%) and Japan (8.2%) have potential. In short, these are two completely different bets: BlackRock and Morgan Stanley are betting that the AI ​​dividend will continue to be monopolized by US tech giants, while JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are betting that AI is a global infrastructure upgrade, and the dividends will spread to non-US markets globally.