Goldman Strategists Say Asset-Heavy Stocks Boosted by AI Fears

Rose Henderson

Tue, February 24, 2026 at 7:18 PM GMT+9 2 min read

Goldman Sachs

(Bloomberg) – Shares in companies with tangible productive assets are outperforming as investors seek havens from artificial intelligence disruption, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. strategists.

The Goldman team said their basket of capital intensive stocks whose economic value derives from physical assets has outperformed a capital light group reliant on human or digital capital by about 35% since the start of 2025.

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Investors are increasingly turning to stocks with what the strategists called the “HALO effect,” for heavy assets and low obsolescence, in sectors like utilities, basic resources and energy, the team including Guillaume Jaisson said in a client note.

“Markets are rewarding capacity, networks, infrastructure and engineering complexity—assets that are costly to replicate and less exposed to technological obsolescence,” Jaisson wrote.

Anxiety over AI applications upending business models has ripped through sectors from software to asset management, sparking sharp declines for stocks previously regarded as surefire winners. These worries have played out in indiscriminate selloffs that spread to industries like logistics that on the surface don’t seem particularly at risk from AI.

The pursuit of AI leadership has also turned previous capital light market outperformers like the five so-called hyperscalers into capital intensive plays, according to the strategists.

These companies — Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Oracle Corp. — are set to spend around $1.5 trillion on building out the AI infrastructure boom between 2023 and 2026, they estimated, compared with the roughly $600 billion the companies had invested in their entire history before 2022.

Higher real yields and geopolitics that drive increased fiscal spend and manufacturing support the move into capital intensive sectors, the Goldman team said. Earnings momentum is also turning in favor of these plays, with consensus expectations for earnings-per-share growth and return on equity now higher for capital intensive companies than the capital light group, they noted.

Over at Morgan Stanley, strategists have also pointed to a move away from asset-light sectors like software. Long-only funds in Europe were already reducing positioning in stocks at risk of AI disruption at the end of 2025, they wrote in a note Monday.

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