AI Companies Receive 42% of US Venture Capital Investment

Venture capital in the U.S. has moved to artificial intelligence (AI) companies at an “unprecedented” rate, HSBC Innovation Banking said Monday (Dec. 16).

The scale of capital invested in AI companies by U.S. venture investors is approaching that allocated to the rest of the venture market, the firm said in a Monday press release outlining findings from Innovation Horizons, its latest quarterly outlook for the U.S. technology sector.

Forty-two percent of U.S. venture capital was invested into AI companies in 2024, up from 36% in 2023 and 22% in 2022, according to the report.

The report also found that as of 2024, 20 AI companies have each raised $2 billion or more.

“Venture capital has always gravitated toward transformative industries, but the level of consolidation we’re seeing within one category is unprecedented,” HSBC U.S. Innovation Banking Head Dave Sabow said in the release.

“The radical change this investment will fuel places us in the dawn of ‘The Agentic Age,’ an era where autonomous artificial intelligence capabilities fundamentally redefine how we communicate, work and interface with digital and physical worlds.”

Investment giant BlackRock said Dec. 7 that it expects 2025 to be a big year for infrastructure and cybersecurity, with the AI boom playing a major role in those investments.

“It’s still very early in the AI adoption cycle,” Jay Jacobs, BlackRock’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, told CNBC in a Dec. 7 report. Jacobs added that AI firms need to build out their data centers and that protecting that data will likely be a wise investment.

The HSBC report came on the same day that SoftBank said it will invest $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years, focusing on AI and related infrastructure.

HSBC Innovation Banking also found in its report that R&D spending from the so-called Magnificent 7 companies totaled more than all the dollars invested in U.S. startups in 2024, according to the release. The Magnificent 7 are Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet.

The firm also said in the release that it expects the U.S. tech sector to see new waves of growth and tailwinds for returns resulting from expected changes in the acquisition market, deregulation and fiscal policies that stimulate economic activity.