AI leads family office investment themes, JPMorgan says

Artificial intelligence tops the investment priority list for family offices globally, a survey from JPMorgan's private bank shows, though allocations lag and remain concentrated in public equities.

Of the 333 single family offices surveyed from 30 countries, 65% want to invest in AI — making it the top investment theme ahead of health care innovation, infrastructure assets and cybersecurity. However, most of the current AI exposure is limited to large-cap publicly traded companies.

Allocation to venture capital and growth equity is small, with just 3.3% allocated on average and more than half the survey respondents reporting no exposure.

The survey found 79% of the family offices, which have an average net worth of $1.6 billion, reported no allocations to infrastructure investment — a hot area given the demands AI has on data centers and power. The survey was conducted from May to July 2025.

Still, the conversation is evolving quickly, with family offices increasingly favoring investments in the infrastructure and services powering the AI boom, said William Sinclair, global co-head of the family office practice at J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

"We're having a lot of dialogue with families around how they think about investing in AI adjacent, where they don't have to pick which is going to be the winner — whether it's ChatGPT, Anthropic, any one of these big businesses," Sinclair said in an interview.

Family offices are increasing their hedging against what they view as the number one risk: geopolitics. They continue to shy away from crypto as a hedge with 89% reporting no exposure, but they are leaning more into gold.

While only 28% of families held gold last year, that allocation has already increased since the survey as family offices seek exposure, Sinclair said.

"We've seen more clients allocate to gold since we conducted this report last year and I see that number continuing to increase," he said. "A lot of clients will buy allocated physical bars of gold through us in one of our three vaults — either New York, London or Singapore."

Those who ranked geopolitics as their greatest concern had twice the exposure already to gold than other survey respondents, the survey found, but it remains to be seen whether that hedge will pay off. Spot gold fell as much as 10% on Monday and is now down almost a fifth from an all-time high last week.