Apollo Chief Economist: The profit margins of the seven tech giants are rising, while the rest of the S&P companies are stagnant

The chief economist of the American asset management firm Apollo, Torsten Sløk, released five charts, believing that AI has not yet brought significant financial returns to large American companies outside of the tech giants. The per capita revenue and profit margins of the seven tech giants continue to rise; excluding them, the 493 companies in the S&P have seen these two metrics remain basically stagnant, and the data on total factor productivity in the U.S. has not shown significant signs of AI-driven growth.

Apollo cited data from the corporate payment platform Ramp, stating that among its clients, the top 10% of companies by spending contributed 99.5% of the model hosting and inference costs. Among the top 1% of companies with the highest AI spending, about 80% have venture capital backgrounds; for companies at the median spending level, this ratio is only 13%. A large amount of AI computing power consumption is concentrated in a few companies, many of which rely on venture capital support.

Previous statistics from Apollo indicated that during the second quarter earnings season of 2026, 69% of S&P 500 companies had disclosed that they were actually using AI, but only 2% reported metrics for ongoing tracking of effectiveness. Another NBER study updated in October this year surveyed nearly 9,000 corporate executives from seven countries, with respondents estimating that over the past three years, AI has only improved the annual growth rate of labor productivity in companies by about 0.2 percentage points.