Is AI really holding up the stock market? And what happens if it fails or stalls? Let's talk about it

with legendary strategist, Tom Lee, the chief investment officer at Fundstract Capital, who's here

with us in studio today. Tom, great to see you. Thanks for coming down. Great to see it, Alex.

So I want to start just by testing this truism that people have been saying about AI and the stock market for a long time, which is that the only thing holding up the stock market is the AI trade.

You're somebody who looks at this all the time.

Is that true?

It's true and it's not true.

Okay.

Because like, for instance, if you measure it by net income contribution, it's pretty broad-based.

You know, the financials are growing earnings very strong this year.

So banks?

Yeah, banks.

Industrials are contributing a lot to earnings growth.

Of course, tech is.

And tech is a big contributor, but not 100% of tech spend is AI.

A lot of it is maintenance capics and expansion capics and, you know, the catch-up for spending that's been deferred because of COVID, et cetera.

So a lot of the capital expenditure that we're seeing, right, because we see that big tech alone, the Magnificent Seven, is going to spend something like $350 billion in capital expenditures this year.

A lot of people say, oh, it's $350 billion in AI spend.

But what you're just saying now is it's a little more nuanced than that.

Some of it's AI spend, but some of it is just keeping up what their operations are relying on.

Yeah.

I mean, but as a narrative, AI makes sense that it's a U.S. story because most of really, there's

...