Wall Street’s bulls keep raising the bar, and JPMorgan has just nudged it higher again. The bank has lifted its year-end target for the S&P 500 to 8,000, up from 7,800, in a bet that the AI trade still has room to run.
The upgrade is more incremental than dramatic, at least on the surface. With the index trading around 7,758, the new target implies only about 3% of further upside, so this is a vote of continued confidence rather than a call for a melt-up.
What sits underneath the number is the more interesting part. JPMorgan’s strategists argue that the vast AI investments made by the largest cloud companies are now translating into faster revenue growth, the point at which spending stops being a leap of faith and starts looking like a business.
They pointed specifically to the hyperscalers. Strong cloud growth at the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, along with improved visibility into their cash flows, underpins the view that elevated order backlogs will steadily convert into recognised revenue.
The bank put concrete numbers on that optimism. It raised its earnings-per-share estimate for the S&P 500 to $365 for 2026, from $350, and to $420 for 2027, from $390, upgrades that do much of the work in justifying a higher index target.
