{"id":661875,"date":"2026-08-29T08:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T08:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/661875\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T08:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T08:30:15","slug":"bill-gates-is-worried-about-ai-but-investors-are-looking-at-the-upside-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/661875\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Gates is worried about AI, but investors are looking at the upside \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Gates<\/a> may be worried about artificial intelligence<\/a>, but the stock market \u2013 for now at least \u2013 is happier about it.<\/p>\n

Gates warned this week<\/a> in a much-discussed 6,000-word essay that the world is unprepared for the upheaval AI could bring, including the prospect of machines permanently replacing large numbers of jobs.<\/p>\n

Investors are taking a more optimistic view, with the most notable development being that the market\u2019s AI story is no longer simply about a handful of giant technology companies. Data from S&P Dow Jones Indices shows more than 60 per cent of S&P 500<\/a> stocks outperformed the index in June and July. <\/p>\n

The equal-weighted S&P 500, which gives the same weighting to each company rather than favouring the largest, also beat the conventional index in both months and has outperformed it in 2026.<\/p>\n

Indeed, until this week\u2019s results sent it higher, Nvidia \u2013 the world\u2019s most valuable company and the poster child for the AI trade \u2013 had actually underperformed the S&P 500 over the previous year.<\/p>\n

The figures point to a broadening of performance, with indices no longer driven solely by the mega-cap technology giants. Roughly 85 per cent of S&P 500 companies beat earnings estimates in the second quarter. All but one of the S&P 500\u2019s 11 sectors have reported earnings growth over the last year, and nine of the 11 sectors have reported double-digit earnings growth.<\/p>\n

Various factors underpin this growth, but the scale of spending on AI is an obvious one, with capital expenditure feeding into areas of the economy well beyond the companies developing the technology. <\/p>\n

FactSet says the term \u201cAI\u201d was cited on 305 S&P 500 earnings calls in the second quarter, suggesting how widely the technology is now featuring in corporate thinking.<\/p>\n

Valuation expert Prof Aswath Damodaran points to Airbnb and on-demand delivery company DoorDash as examples of businesses that emerged from the infrastructure created by the smartphone revolution. His point is that if AI develops in a similar way, some of its eventual beneficiaries will be companies that are difficult to identify today.<\/p>\n

For now, investors seem less concerned about the disruption Gates fears than about where the benefits might show up next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Gates may be worried about artificial intelligence, but the stock market \u2013 for now at least \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,783,289,290,3189,46136,18,19,17,292,102080,82,80],"class_list":["post-661875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-airbnb","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-bill-gates","tag-doordash","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nvidia","tag-sp500","tag-technology","tag-work"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117177865164245724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}