Goldman’s top strategist just added hard numbers to his earnings-bubble warning

Peter Oppenheimer, Goldman Sachs’ chief global equity strategist, told clients in early August that technology stocks might not have a valuation problem.

Instead, they might have an earnings problem.

In a note published Thursday, he came back with the receipts.

The new report, titled “Competition for Capital,” doesn’t back off the August thesis.

It hardens it, tying the risk of an AI-driven “earnings bubble” to a specific mechanism, a specific historical stress test, and a specific near-term trigger that he says is already showing up in this month’s bond-market turbulence.

He still won’t say that this bubble definitely exists.

But six weeks after first raising the possibility, the hedge is now backed by capex-to-cash-flow data, record credit issuance, and a downgraded near-term outlook on stocks.

The August admission In early August , Oppenheimer wrote that “there does not appear to be a valuation bubble, but there may be an earnings bubble” building in technology stocks—a notable concession from a strategist at what one of the Street’s most consistently bullish research shops.

At the time, Oppenheimer’s evidence was mostly anecdotal.

He pointed to the wild swings in that quarter’s earnings, Microsoft’s stock jumping 17% in a single day on strong earnings, Meta shares falling nearly 10% despite beating estimates, and the equal-weighted S&P 500 outperforming its cap-weighted counterpart by the widest margin since 2009—signs, in his reading, that investors were growing suspicious of how concentrated the earnings growth powering the market actually was.

He linked the risk loosely to “more government debt, increased issuance, and persistent inflation” pushing up the cost of capital, without fully spelling out how that connected back to tech earnings specifically.

Thursday’s note turns that loose linkage into the central argument.

Oppenheimer now says AI infrastructure spending and government borrowing are directly competing for the same pool of capital: private companies raising debt and equity to fund AI data centers, at the same time governments are borrowing more for infrastructure, energy security and defense, all while inflation from higher energy prices pushes policy rates higher too.

That collision, he argues, is what’s driving up the global cost of capital—the mechanism that was only implied in August is now the report’s title and its through-line.