Ackman says the AI selloff may be overdone

June was a buzz saw

The mega-cap AI names just had a month that felt like getting dunked in cold brew. Microsoft dropped 17.2% in June, Oracle sank 35%, and Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet also got dragged as investors fixated on one thing: capex.

And then Bill Ackman showed up like the guy who buys the dip at the exact moment everyone else is sprinting for the exit. He amplified a bullish take on the hyperscalers, basically arguing the market is staring at the spending bill and missing the payoff.

The whole fight is about cash

Here’s the setup: the five biggest hyperscalers are projected to spend more than $700 billion in 2026 on AI infrastructure. That number is so giant it makes buybacks and dividends look like pocket lint. Bank of America says hyperscaler capex has climbed from about 70% of operating cash flow in 2025 to nearly 100% in 2026.

That’s why the market got grumpy. If your free cash flow gets swallowed by data centers, GPUs, and racks of humming metal, there’s less left for the cozy shareholder stuff investors love.

Why the bulls think this is backwards

Ackman’s bullish angle is basically: what if the market is punishing the tollbooths instead of the traffic?

• Hyperscalers collect fees no matter which AI model is doing the work.
• Cheaper open-weight models may actually increase usage, not kill it.
• More usage means more tokens flying through Amazon’s Bedrock, Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, and Google’s Vertex.

In other words, if AI gets cheaper, people might use a lot more of it — which is annoying for budgets but pretty nice if you own the pipes.

Big picture

This is a classic Wall Street mood swing: first the stock market worships the buildout, then it panics over the bill. Ackman is betting the second move is too dramatic. If he’s right, the ugly June selloff may end up looking less like the AI story breaking and more like investors briefly forgetting who owns the toll road.