Catenaa, Sunday, February 15, 2026- AI is set to cause turmoil in the stock market through stock dumping by investors at the slightest risk of displacement and through heavy capex spending.
Accordingly, AI is poised to disrupt entire segments of the economy so dramatically that investors are dumping the stocks of any company seen as even slightly at risk of being displaced by the technology.
The other is a deep skepticism that the hundreds of billions of dollars that tech giants like Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Alphabet are pouring into AI every year will deliver big payoffs anytime soon.
The dueling anxieties have been brewing for months. But they’ve shifted to the center of the stock market over the past two weeks.
The result has been a series of punishing selloffs that have hammered dozens of companies across a number of industries, from real estate services and wealth management to insurance brokers and logistics firms, and wiped more than $1 trillion from the market values of the big tech companies investing the most in AI.
The shift marks a major break from the sentiment of the last few years, when speculation that AI would set off a transformative productivity boom kept pushing stock prices higher.
While big tech stocks kept rising, sending Meta surging nearly 450% from the end of 2022 until the start of this year, and Alphabet up more than 250%, the hand-wringing over whether it was a bubble about to burst did little to derail the rally.
Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet alone are expected to spend more than $600 billion on capital expenditures in 2026.
That’s hoovering up free cash flows and loading the companies with depreciating assets, radically altering many of the characteristics that have helped fuel the firms’ rise over the past decade.
