Goldman and JPMorgan Are Turning Into AI Stocks, One Venture Investor Says
PSP Growth's Momei Qu argues Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are becoming AI stocks because they finance the buildout, not because they build the models. The reported numbers don't show it yet, and that's the part worth arguing about.
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase carry a combined market value north of $900 billion. Neither one trains a frontier model. Neither one sells a GPU. And yet a venture investor says both should now be counted as AI stocks.
That's a claim worth poking at.
The Call
Momei Qu, head of venture at PSP Growth, made the case on Bloomberg's The Close. Her thesis is that the two banks are becoming artificial intelligence plays, and that the connection shows up in how they talk about the technology rather than in what they report on the income statement. Financing and deal work tie them to the buildout, she said. Earnings don't reflect it yet.
She's got a point about the plumbing. JPMorgan and Goldman sit at the center of the money moving into data centers, power generation, and compute. JPMorgan's technology budget has been running somewhere around $17 billion a year, a number that would've sounded absurd a decade ago and now reads like table stakes. Goldman has been pushing AI tools across its own workflows while its bankers underwrite the debt and equity that hyperscalers and their suppliers need.
And there's a lot of that debt. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have guided toward combined capital spending that could approach $320 billion this year. Some of it comes from cash flow. The rest gets financed, syndicated, or packaged into private credit vehicles, and that's where the banks live.
Granted, PSP Growth is a venture firm, so Qu isn't a neutral observer of a story about capital flowing into technology. To be fair, that doesn't make her wrong.
The Analysis
Here's the tension. Banks earn fees, not rents. When you underwrite a data center loan, you book the fee and move on. Compare that to Nvidia, which sells the same chip into every new cluster and keeps a piece of the recurring demand. Or Microsoft, which converts AI spending into Azure revenue that shows up quarter after quarter.
Does that make JPMorgan an AI stock, or just a well-paid middleman? I'm not entirely convinced the label fits yet.
Proponents will tell you the label matters because it changes the multiple. If investors start pricing these banks off AI-related growth instead of net interest margin and credit quality, you get a different valuation conversation. The narrative pulls in a different shareholder base. Skeptics, myself included on most days, will point out that fee income tied to a capex cycle behaves exactly like fee income tied to a capex cycle. When the buildout slows, the deal flow thins, and the AI story evaporates from the earnings call.
The question worth asking: what happens to these franchises if hyperscaler spending flattens in, say, 2027? History suggests the second derivative matters more than the headline. Bank stocks don't love that math.
The Takeaway
Don't expect a clean re-rating. What you should watch is language. Listen for AI on the next few earnings calls, specifically any disclosure about data center lending exposure, private credit commitments, and loan-loss reserves tied to energy and infrastructure. If those lines grow while the narrative grows with them, Qu's thesis gets harder to dismiss.
Color me skeptical, but I'll be reading the 10-Ks. Time will tell, though the filings will tell you sooner.
