Yorkville Ives partner Dan Ives says the AI spending cycle is less than 15% complete
Yorkville Ives partner and senior managing director Dan Ives said in an interview in October 2026 that less than 15% of the AI spending cycle has been completed, and the industry is still in its early stage.
MarketBeat reported that Ives estimated at the Las Vegas conference that less than 15% of total AI spending had actually occurred. He compared the current cycle to a party that started at 9:30 p.m. and is now approaching 11:30 p.m., with more companies joining in rather than being led only by NVIDIA and Jensen Huang. Ives also said the technology bull market still has two to three years of room to run. In an October report, Yorkville Ives described the AI revolution as the third inning of a nine-inning game, with 2026 as the inflection year.
Ives has previously used similar wording many times. In a CNBC interview in May 2026, he said that the AI revolution was 10% to 15% complete and mentioned that as much as $4 trillion in spending may still remain to occur. In a conversation with Anthony Pompliano in October, he said that every dollar of capital expenditure corresponds to a 5 to 6 times multiplier effect for the technology industry, and he believed Wall Street was underestimating earnings over the next 12 to 18 months by 15% to 25%.
Original sources:
Title: The AI Buildout Is Only 15% Complete—Here Is Where the Next Dollar Actually Goes Publisher: MarketBeat Publication date: 2026-10-21 URL：https://www.marketbeat.com/articles/the-ai-buildout-is-only-15-completehere-is-where-the-next-dollar-actually-goes/ Source type: media report (quoting Ives interview) Verification status: full text read in this session (2026-10-27) Supporting content: explicitly recorded Ives’s estimate that less than 15% of total AI spending had actually happened; also recorded his party metaphor and references to NVIDIA, AMD, Palantir and other companies.
Title: AI Stocks Are Falling. Dan Ives Says It’s Just Getting Started. Publisher: MarketBeat Publication date: 2026-10-19 URL：https://www.marketbeat.com/videos/ai-stocks-are-falling-dan-ives-says-its-just-getting-started/ Source type: video interview report Verification status: page description read in this session (2026-10-27) Supporting content: confirmed that Ives said at the conference that the AI spending cycle was less than 15% complete, and believed the technology bull market still has two to three years left.
Title: Wedbush's Ives: Still less than 10-15% through AI revolution Publisher: CNBC International Publication date: 2026-05-29 URL：https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-CBRjCt5hE Source type: television interview Verification status: transcript summary read in this session (2026-10-27) Supporting content: Ives said he believed the AI revolution was still less than 10% to 15% complete, and mentioned as much as $4 trillion in potential AI spending.
ABAB AI Insight
Since 2025, Dan Ives has continued to use a “third inning” or “10%-15% complete” framework to describe the AI cycle. In 2026, after leaving Wedbush and joining Yorkville Ives, he continued to track capital expenditures and enterprise adoption using similar language. An October report showed that the five major cloud platforms’ 2026 AI capital expenditure commitments were about $850 billion, up from $725 billion in May, with cloud backlog orders at a record high.
On the capital path, Ives has expanded spending from hyperscale cloud service providers to enterprises, sovereigns, and new cloud providers. In recent interviews, he said the gap between capital expenditure and actual monetization is narrowing, and that companies such as Palantir and Snowflake are nearing the end of that gap. He also estimated that every dollar of capital expenditure generates a 5 to 6 times multiplier in the technology industry, and compared the debt and backlog of companies such as CoreWeave, saying the latter is relatively small.
Compared with views that treat the current high level of capital expenditure as the top of a bubble, Ives frames it as the early stage of a multi-year buildout cycle. He distinguished 1996-1997 from the 2000 bubble and believed that regulatory or data-center construction slowdowns could cede the lead to China. In October, Yorkville Ives added SpaceX and Dell to its AI 30 list while removing some software companies.
The specific judgment is that by repeatedly using the “less than 15%” framing, Ives has redefined current AI capital expenditure as a buildout stage with substantial room ahead. When the same analyst anchors the completion rate below 15% across multiple occasions while simultaneously raising cloud-platform capital expenditure figures, the market discussion shifts from “whether the top has been reached” to “where the next layer of spending will land”; his judgment depends on estimates of future total spending rather than the share of realized revenue. The key follow-up points are whether hyperscale companies’ capital expenditure guidance in the fourth quarter of 2026 and in 2027 will continue to move higher, and whether enterprise monetization metrics will narrow the gap with capital expenditure as Ives expects.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The analyst anchors the AI spending completion rate below 15% to distinguish the early buildout stage from a bubble top.
The capital expenditure multiplier is estimated at 5 to 6 times, used to explain the spillover from hardware spending to the broader technology sector.
Higher cloud-platform capital expenditure figures and the “third inning” framework appear at the same time, forming a single cycle judgment.