Remember when there were “internet companies”? And then, before you knew it, just about every company was heavily leveraging the internet to compete.
In a matter of business déjà vu, artificial intelligence is progressing fast toward the same state. According to a report by the investing research platform BestBrokers, 218 S&P 500 companies, or 43.3%, are “directly exposed” to the AI economy. Together they account for a substantial majority — just over 62%, or about $42.4 trillion — of the index’s market capitalization.
These are companies for which AI has become materially important to their business model, investment thesis or long-term growth prospects, the report noted. They encompass utilities, networking firms, data center operators, industrial suppliers and enterprise software companies.
It’s an enormous change from two years ago, when most investors primarily associated AI with a handful of companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Alphabet and a handful of semiconductor businesses.
“Artificial intelligence has become the largest investment system in the S&P 500 — not because every company builds AI, but because AI now influences almost every layer of the modern economy,” BestBrokers wrote.
Many of the AI-linked companies have experienced explosive surges in their stock prices.
What the report calls “core AI,” consisting of companies that build AI tools, represents just 11.5% of the S&P 500 companies. There are almost three times as many “AI-linked” companies, or 31.8% of the total, that provide infrastructure that enables AI, supply essential components to the AI value chain, or have AI technologies deeply integrated into their products and services.
The 56.7% of companies that have no meaningful direct connection to the AI economy constitute only 38% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization.
The single biggest category of the AI economy consists of chips and hardware, representing 18.1% of the total S&P 500’s market cap, followed by cloud and model (17.2%), software (10.8%), energy (6.0%), data centers (3.1%) and infrastructure (3%).
The largest group of AI-linked companies is in the energy and power infrastructure category, with 58 companies.
“Many of these businesses play supporting rather than starring roles in the AI revolution,” BestBrokers wrote. “Yet they have become indispensable to its expansion, and the growth in their stocks is demonstrating how investors think. The market increasingly recognizes that every AI model ultimately depends on a much larger ecosystem.”
The market capitalization figures cited in the report are as of July 6, 2006, sourced from companiesmarketcap.com.
