AI Boom: What Could Come Next

September 2026

Artificial intelligence has moved from research curiosity to one of the topics dominating global capital markets in just a few years.

Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, AI has reordered equity market leadership, redirected hundreds of billions of dollars of annual capital expenditure toward data centers, chips, and power, and drawn public and private credit markets into financing a buildout whose returns remain unproven. While forecasts for AI-related investment may vary considerably depending on assumptions, it is expected that another $4 trillion to $8 trillion could be invested in AI-related infrastructure over the next five years. Each year of the boom has produced a new narrative and a new analytical framework, from scaling laws to the DeepSeek moment to agentic demand. What none of the narratives or frameworks have settled is where the boom goes from here, and which indicators can help distinguish one path from another.