The AI trade broadening rally is entering a new phase, with market leadership rotating away from chipmakers and towards a wider cast of sectors, including consumer discretionary stocks and hyperscalers that had until recently been left behind.
Chipmakers surged more than 100% in 2026 before running into resistance in recent weeks. That reversal has coincided with a rebound for hyperscalers, the cloud and platform giants that had lost ground to semiconductors during the earlier leg of the AI bull run.
The clearest signal that something structural is shifting comes from the equal-weighted S&P 500, which has been outperforming its market-cap-weighted counterpart since the start of June. When the equal-weight index leads, it means buying pressure is spreading across more stocks, not just concentrating in the largest names.
What the RSP vs SPY gap reveals about the AI trade broadening rally
The ETF numbers put figures to the shift. According to Yahoo Finance, RSP, the equal-weighted S&P 500 ETF, returned 9.67% year-to-date as of data through 9 June 2026, against 8.38% for SPY, the cap-weighted equivalent. Over the prior month, RSP gained 2.49% while SPY was essentially flat at -0.08%.
The structural reason that gap matters: as noted by EBC Financial Group, SPY’s top ten holdings account for 36.46% of its assets, while RSP resets every constituent to roughly 0.2% at each quarterly rebalance. When RSP outpaces SPY, smaller and mid-weight companies are pulling their weight, which was not the case for most of the period since the AI boom took hold in 2023.
Since March 2022, SPY has still returned 54.29% against RSP’s 38.08% over that same stretch, underlining how extreme cap-weighted dominance had become before this year’s reversal.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs both see room to run
Morgan Stanley chief investment officer Mike Wilson has been among the most vocal proponents of the broadening theme. In the firm’s 2026 US equity outlook, published in November 2025, Wilson set a 12-month S&P 500 price target of 7,800, built on 17% earnings growth and a modest valuation contraction from current levels.
Wilson upgraded consumer discretionary to overweight in that outlook and expressed a preference for goods over services within the sector for the first time since 2021. Financials, industrials, and healthcare were also named as favoured sectors. His more recent commentary has refined that view further, flagging consumer discretionary and transports as his two top sector picks, with both already beating the S&P 500 by 12% over the prior two months.
On hyperscalers, Wilson argues the capex pain is still ahead for chipmakers, whereas hyperscalers have already committed to large spending programmes and absorbed the market reaction. That asymmetry, in his view, makes hyperscalers relatively attractive from here.
Goldman Sachs arrives at a similar conclusion from a different starting point. The firm’s US stocks forecast, updated as of 24 April 2026, carries a year-end S&P 500 target of 7,600, grounded in expectations of 12% earnings-per-share growth in 2026 and 10% EPS growth in 2027, with the index trading at around 21 times earnings, slightly below the 22 times reached in January 2026. Goldman also noted that the S&P 500 surged about 13% from 30 March 2026, its sharpest rally since April 2020.
Ben Snider, Goldman’s US stock-strategy chief, has pointed to hyperscaler valuations as a driver of that argument, noting that the group had been trading near the bottom of its long-term range before its recent recovery.
One reason to watch hyperscaler momentum carefully: a Goldman Sachs US Weekly Kickstart note dated 12 June 2026 forecasts that depreciation and amortisation for mega-cap hyperscalers, covering Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, will climb from 7% of hyperscaler revenues in 2022 to 12% in 2027. Rising depreciation is a direct drag on return on equity, which means earnings visibility for the group will depend increasingly on revenue growth keeping pace with that mounting cost base.
If both banks are right, the path forward is not a retreat from AI but a rebalancing within it: hyperscalers regaining ground, chipmakers digesting their run, and a broader cohort of sectors drawing in capital that had been parked in a handful of names. Wilson’s 7,800 target and Goldman’s 7,600 imply the index still has upside to cover, and the next test will be whether consumer discretionary and transport stocks can sustain their lead as earnings season gets under way.