Bill Gates is worried about AI, but investors are looking at the upside – The Irish Times
Bill Gates is worried about AI, but investors are looking at the upside – The Irish Times
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Bill Gates is worried about AI, but investors are looking at the upside
Capital expenditure on AI is feeding into areas
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Subscriber Only
Your Money
Bill Gates is worried about AI, but investors are looking at the upside
Capital expenditure on AI is feeding into areas of the economy well beyond the companies developing the technology
Bill Gates warned that the world is unprepared for the upheaval AI could bring, including in the labour market. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
Proinsias O'Mahony
Sat Aug 29 2026 - 06:00
2 MIN READ
Bill Gates
may be worried about
artificial intelligence
, but the stock market – for now at least – is happier about it.
warned this week
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.
Investors are taking a more optimistic view, with the most notable development being that the market’s 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
stocks outperformed the index in June and July.
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.
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Indeed, until this week’s results sent it higher, Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company and the poster child for the AI trade – had actually underperformed the S&P 500 over the previous year.
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