Wall Street’s favorite question about AI, “but when does it actually make money?,” keeps getting the same answer from Goldman Sachs: it doesn’t matter yet, because the spending isn’t slowing down.
Goldman’s 1-Delta desk, led by Rich Privorotsky, is making the case that AI infrastructure investment remains firmly intact even as broader markets have wobbled and skeptics have questioned the return on all those GPU purchases.
The numbers behind the conviction
Goldman’s research projects that hyperscaler capital expenditures will land somewhere between $527 billion and $765 billion in 2026. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a cumulative figure. That’s a single year.
For context, the previous estimate for 2026 hyperscaler capex sat at $465 billion. Goldman revised it upward to $527 billion on the low end, a bump of more than 13%.
