A $30 trillion gamble on global diffusion: The bipolar narrative of AI in 2026

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

1. What bubble are we talking about? Will the AI industry enter an accelerated investment phase?

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

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

However, JPMorgan provided 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 the profits of some companies and help giants optimize their profitability narrative. To truly achieve a substantial return from the transformative productivity of AI, it will take many years.

In fact, it just mentioned one point: 2026 will still be a year of crazy spending on AI, but it is still just the investment phase, far from the harvest moment;

2. Which side are you on regarding the concentration dividend of US stocks and the spillover to non-US markets?

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

According to the data, as of YTD 2025, the equal-weighted S&P 500 in the US stock market has only risen by 3%, while the market-cap-weighted version for leading tech companies has increased by 11%. This 8% difference may be attributed to the concentration dividend of AI.

In this regard, Morgan Stanley is the most aggressive, setting a target of 7800 points for the S&P 500, which represents a 14% increase from now, 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, thus providing an annual expected return of 10.9% for emerging markets, which is higher than the 6.7% for U.S. large-cap stocks. Goldman Sachs also supports this spillover view, giving emerging markets the same expected return of 10.9%, while believing that Europe has a chance at 7.1% and Japan at 8.2%.

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