Wall Street Says the AI Trade Is Over. The Data Disagrees.
A Fortune headline this week declared "The AI Trade Is Over." Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Oppenheimer all published notes saying the same thing in different ways. AI stocks have quietly deflated over the past year without a single dramatic crash.
Here's the part they buried: AI earnings never collapsed. Tech sector earnings per share are projected to grow 44% in Q1 2026, accounting for 87% of all S&P 500 earnings growth. Goldman estimates that AI infrastructure investment will drive roughly 40% of all S&P 500 earnings growth this year.
The trade isn't over. The hype cycle is over. Those are very different things.
What's Actually Happening This Week
Meta launched Muse Spark, its first major AI model since spending $14 billion to bring in Scale AI's CEO. The company is projecting $115–135 billion in AI capital expenditures this year — nearly double last year. Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation and now serves over 1,000 enterprise customers spending more than $1 million annually.
These aren't companies pulling back. They're companies that have moved past the announcement phase into the deployment phase.
The Opportunity in the Gap
Morgan Stanley's chief equity strategist noted something important: the technology sector's price-to-earnings-to-growth ratio has now fallen below the global market average — a level last seen at the trough of the dotcom bust in 2003. Oppenheimer called it "a once-in-a-lifetime chance to acquire stocks that have been expensive for decades."
When the headlines say the trade is over and the earnings say otherwise, that gap is where opportunity lives. Understanding which companies sit at the chokepoints of the AI buildout — and why their earnings keep growing regardless of sentiment — is exactly what we track at MasicotAI.
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