Artificial intelligence (AI) appears as if it could be one of the game-changing technologies of this generation. Many of the leading technology companies in the world are investing heavily in the technology, as they race to take advantage of what many are calling a once-in-a-generation opportunity with AI.
Let's look at three AI stocks that investors can buy right now.
If there was any thought that major technology companies would slow down their AI infrastructure spending in the wake of Chinese AI start-up DeekSeek's claims of building an AI model for under $6 million, that just isn't the case. In fact, AI infrastructure spending is only skyrocketing.
The three big cloud computing companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet -- announced they will invest a combined $255 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely directed at AI infrastructure. Meta Platforms will spend between $60 billion to $65 billion on capex largely related to AI. Amazon said that as per-unit costs for infrastructure come down, it is likely to lead to more overall spending.
Nvidia (NVDA 0.90%) remains the best way to play the AI infrastructure trend. Its graphic processing units (GPUs) are the main chips used to provide the computing power to train large language models (LLMs) and run AI inference. It has an approximate 90% market share in the GPU space, largely stemming from the wide moat it has created with its CUDA software platform.
The company created this platform long ago to allow customers the ability to program its chips for purposes beyond their original function: to speed up graphics rendering in video games. In the years since, it has built CUDA X, a collection of microservices, libraries, tools, and technologies, on top of CUDA specifically designed for AI and high-performance computing.
Nvidia's growth has been outstanding, with the company on track for its second straight year of triple-digit revenue growth. Meanwhile, the stock is still attractively priced with a forward-price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 30 times 2025 analysts' estimates and a price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) of 0.9. PEGs below 1 typically indicate a stock is undervalued.
While known as the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce (CRM -1.50%) is making a push into the next big phase of AI: agentic AI.
The first phase of AI has really focused on generative AI, where users can create content, whether it be text, images, or video, through prompts. ChatGPT and Alphabet's Gemini app are good examples of this. Agentic AI takes it a step further, where AI agents can autonomously perform tasks to meet specific goals with little human interaction.
Salesforce jumped into agentic AI with its new Agentforce solution. It offers a number of out-of-the-box AI agents that can handle various tasks such as customer service, sales and marketing, and recruiting, while it also allows its agents to be customized through low-code and no-code tools within its platform.
Introduced in October, Agentforce grew quickly, with the company announcing in mid-December that it already had more than 1,000 deals in place. Meanwhile, the company forecast that it would have 1 billion agents deployed by the end of its fiscal 2026 (ending January 2026). A consumption product that costs $2 per conversation, Agentforce is a huge opportunity for the company that only becomes more valuable the better the solution becomes.
Trading at a forward P/E of 29 times next year's analyst estimates, the stock is cheap.
While it's been one of the hottest stocks over the past year, up about 690%, AppLovin (APP -1.29%) still trades at an attractive value, with a forward P/E of 49 times and a PEG under 3 times. AppLovin operates an adtech platform that gaming apps use to attract and better monetize users. It also owns a portfolio of some legacy gaming apps as well.
The company's growth skyrocketed since the launch of its AI-powered Axon-2 adtech solution in the summer of 2023. This includes 39% overall revenue growth last quarter and 66% from its software platform segment. At the same time, its gross margins are quickly expanding, including a 820-basis point year-over-year jump to 77.5% last quarter. So not only is AppLovin growing its revenue quickly, but its expanding gross margins mean more of the revenue it generates is dropping to the bottom line as profits as well.
The company thinks that it can continue to grow its gaming adtech business by 20% to 30% a year just from gaming market growth, as well as its algorithm continuing to improve through self-learnings. However, it has been testing Axon-2 with verticals outside of gaming, and thinks that e-commerce could become a meaningful contributor this year.
If Axon-2 can prove successful outside of gaming apps, AppLovin should have a lot more upside ahead, even after its already big run.
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