Goldman Sachs: US AI spending not boosting earnings yet
US companies are pouring money into AI, but according to Goldman Sachs, the payoff hasn't really shown up in their earnings yet.
Sure, earnings of hyperscalers and AI infrastructure companies benefiting from their capital expenditure rose 54% year-on-year, making up almost half of the S&P 500's overall growth in Q2 2026, but most industries haven't seen big financial wins from all this tech spending.
Median per-employee monthly AI spend $12
Even with AI budgets rising fast, the median company's monthly AI spending per employee rose from $5 at the start of the year to $12 in July,
only 11% of S&P 500 companies noticed real productivity boosts in things like coding or customer support.
And just 2% could actually link those improvements to higher earnings.
For now, AI inference expenses are less than 0.5% of S&P 500 revenues and mostly come from shifting around existing budgets, not new income.
Still, analysts think bigger benefits could show up as more businesses figure out how to use AI well.