S&P 500 Earnings Boom: 27.1% Growth Signals AI Inflection

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When Thomas Edison stood in his Menlo Park laboratory and let a carbon filament glow for 13.5 hours, the skeptics who had spent two decades calling electric light a parlor trick were immediately silenced. Within ten years, electricity went from being a curiosity for the rich to wiring the streets of Manhattan. Within twenty years, the gas men were extinct.

Right now, Wall Street is having its Menlo Park moment.

The AI boom isn’t a story anymore… it’s a number. A very large, very specific, very inconvenient-for-skeptics number.

For two years, every rally has been dogged by the same whisper: what if it’s just hype? Every capex headline came with a “but where are the earnings?” footnote. Bears built entire theses on the gap between AI promises and AI profits.

With roughly 63% of S&P 500 companies reporting, the blended earnings growth rate sits at 27.1%, or more than double the 13% analysts penciled in heading into the season.

For context, the last time corporate America posted a number that big was the fourth quarter of 2021, and that was a recovery bounce off COVID-shuttered 2020 comps. Strip out the recession-rebound years (post-COVID, post-GFC, post-dot-com, post-early-90s) and you find that a 27% earnings print outside a recession has, essentially, never happened.

Every bear argument about “AI capex with no return” just got shredded in a single quarter. The companies driving this number are the AI names, including Nvidia (NVDA), Micron (MU), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Amazon (AMZN). Buckle up for the next leg of the AI Boom!

Below, we’ll unpack what 27.1% earnings growth tells you about positioning for the rest of 2026, why we think the rally has “very solid footing,” and the under-the-radar disruption story unfolding at Amazon that may quietly become the next AWS-sized win.

Click the video below to watch now:

Why This Earnings Season Breaks the Rulebook

Historically, 20%-plus blended earnings growth is something you only see when the S&P is climbing out of a hole. There’s no hole this time. There was no earnings recession in 2023, 2024, or 2025. Earnings have been growing all along… and yet here comes a quarter that prints like the economy just got off the canvas.

The magnitude of this growth, absent a recession base effect, points to AI infrastructure, chips, hyperscalers, memory, and cloud computing. The capex everyone has been wringing their hands about is showing up as revenue and earnings on the other side of the ledger.

For investors, the takeaway is: this is a momentum market driven by a fundamental engine, not a sentiment cycle.

The “is it a bubble?” debate doesn’t square with a 27% earnings print.

The Amazon Story Hiding Inside the AI Story

Beyond the headline AI names, Amazon just launched what it’s calling Amazon Supply Chain Services, arguably the single most important Amazon development since AWS. The pattern mirrors that of AWS’ development: Amazon builds an internal capability, perfects it for itself, then turns around and sells it to everyone else. AWS started as a back-office project and now prints the money that funds the rest of the business.

If supply chain follows that arc, the implications stretch well beyond AMZN. Traditional logistics names are already underperforming. United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) has gone essentially nowhere since 2015 while the S&P 500 has roughly tripled.

The market may have been pricing in the inevitable for a decade.

The Bottom Line: This Train Is Already Leaving the Station

Step back and look at what just happened…

A 27.1% blended earnings print (a number we historically only see clawing out of recessions) landed in the middle of an ongoing expansion. The biggest contributors are the same names that have been called overvalued for two straight years. The “show me the earnings” crowd just got shown the earnings.

And underneath the headline number, the disruption is widening, not narrowing. Amazon is moving from cloud dominance into logistics dominance. The hyperscalers are spending like it’s 1999… except this time, they’re booking the revenue to match. Memory, chips, networking, and power are all flashing the same supply-meets-demand-meets-pricing-power signal that defined the great supercycles of the past.

Could the market wobble? Of course. Iran flare-ups, dollar gyrations, a hot inflation print… any of these could shake out a few percent. But the core engine isn’t sentiment. It’s earnings. And earnings just told you, in language Wall Street can’t ignore, that the AI buildout is profitable and accelerating.

The investors who waited for “confirmation” before getting positioned just got it. The question is no longer whether the AI boom is happening. It’s which names compound the hardest from here… and whether you’re holding them before the rest of the market finishes catching up.

Get the Full Playbook

We walk you through everything in this week’s episode of Being Exponential, including the AI infrastructure names I’m most bullish on, why precious metals deserve a second look on this dip, and my “line in the sand” for Bitcoin’s (BTC/USD) next move.

If you’re trying to position for the next leg of this earnings boom, watch the full episode. The window between signal confirmed and consensus pricing is the window where the real money gets made… and that window is open right now.