Analysts expect S&P 500 tech companies to lift operating cash flow from $1.18T in 2025 to $2.85T in 2028, 2.4 times as much. The other 8 sectors, the companies that buy tech, are expected to grow 54% together and add $844B, about half of what tech adds alone.
Investment BastionSources: Investment Bastion, company filings, analyst consensus as of Oct 6, 2026. Idea: Apollo Chief Economist.
Five companies deliver 65% of the $1.68T tech is expected to add. Most of it is the AI build-out: chips, memory and the cloud platforms that rent them out.
Tech's revenue is other companies' spending on software, chips and cloud capacity. Analysts covering each sector forecast on their own, and the sums do not line up: tech is priced for demand that more than doubles its cash flow, while the companies paying for it grow theirs by about half. Either tech's customers spend a much larger share of their cash on tech, or the tech estimates come down.
Part of the demand is tech buying from itself. The cloud platforms buying NVIDIA, Broadcom and Micron chips sit in the same bar as the chipmakers, so the same dollar of AI spending is a cost in one tech company and cash flow in another.
Each bar sums the operating cash flow of current S&P 500 members in the sector. 2025 is the reported figure; 2028 is the analyst consensus estimate. Fiscal years are matched to the calendar year they mostly cover, so NVIDIA's year to January 2026 counts as 2025. For 40 companies whose latest fiscal year is not yet in our dataset, the last twelve months stand in for 2025.
Sectors follow Apollo's chart so the bars compare one to one. Technology covers software, semiconductors, hardware, IT services, media and telecom, close to the GICS Information Technology and Communication Services sectors. Amazon, Tesla and Booking sit in Consumer discretionary and Uber in Industrials, as in GICS. Financials are left out: bank operating cash flow mostly tracks loans and deposits, not earnings.