US stocks increasingly rest on AI pillar

Tech companies boosted US stocks to fresh highs on Tuesday, even as warnings bubbled up over the AI boom’s outsized grip on markets.

Despite geopolitical turbulence — a rocky energy market in particular — there is “more greed than there is fear,” Goldman Sachs’ CEO said Tuesday.

But outside AI, stocks are far weaker than headline indexes suggest, and investors are underestimating the risk that carries, a market strategist argued, since “the profit cycle and the market narrative are all leaning on the same narrow pillar.”

Companies have yet to show real returns on their AI investments, Goldman’s head of equity research said on a podcast. “That doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen. It just means the stakes are higher.”