The landscape of top artificial intelligence stocks continues to evolve. Amid worries over an AI bubble, investors need to be picky when looking at semiconductor, software and other plays. Among AI stocks in the spotlight are Oracle (ORCL), Nvidia (NVDA), Palantir (PLTR), CoreWeave (CRWV) and Snowflake (SNOW).
To be sure, top AI stocks such as Nvidia face high expectations. For many companies — such as Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon.com (AMZN), Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) — the rise of generative AI poses both risk and opportunity.
Many companies suddenly tout AI product roadmaps. In general, look for AI stocks that use artificial intelligence to improve products or gain a strategic edge.
AI Stocks: Bubble In The Making?
What’s clear is that investor worries over a tech bubble similar to 1999 have increased amid vendor financing issues and the securitization of loans to data center infrastructure builders. During the dot.com boom, telecom equipment vendors provided financing to builders of fiber-optic networks.
Recent deals have added to concerns over growing “circularity” in the AI ecosystem, which blend investments with commercial relationships. As Morgan Stanley put it in a report: “Suppliers are funding customers and sharing revenue; there is cross-ownership and rising concentration.”
One worry is that AI chip makers, such as Nvidia, are shoring up demand by investing in startups and other companies.
The Google Search index for “AI bubble” rose from zero in mid-September to 100 on Oct. 2, noted economist Ed Yardeni in a report.
Salesforce Analyst Day Set Amid AI Agent Push
Enterprise software maker Salesforce (CRM) hosts an investor day Oct. 15 during its Dreamforce conference. Salesforce stock has retreated 28% in 2025 despite the company touting autonomous, goal-driven AI “agents” that complete tasks on their own.
“(At Dreamforce 2025) We’re anticipating hearing about advances in deterministic AI agents, potential moves to unlock voice AI in the enterprise as well as broader lifecycle management and observability of agents via Agentforce innovations,” said Truist analyst Terry Tillman in a report.
Aiming to get a artificial intelligence boost, Salesforce has agreed to buy Informatica (INFA) for $8 billion.
Oracle Hosts Analyst Day Oct. 16
Oracle hosts an analyst day on Oct. 16 during the Oracle AI World Conference. It’ll be a big event for AI stocks.
Wall Street analysts are expected to focus on Oracle’s ability to finance massive data center build-outs and the economics of big cloud computing deals with OpenAI and others. The Information recently reported that Oracle will generate much lower profit margins than what Wall Street has been expecting.
“We anticipate investor focus will be on unpacking the investment required to capture the revenue opportunity and the level of operating profit and (return on invested capital) associated with this business,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick in a report.
For investors in AI stocks, accounting rules matter a lot in the case of cloud computing service providers. Oracle, Google, CoreWeave and other cloud companies need to deal with depreciation of data center infrastructure, a growing issue in capital spending.
Meanwhile, Oracle stock has gained 76% in 2025.
The IBD Methodology: How To Invest In Stocks While Managing Risks
Oracle stock soared Sept. 10 on its guidance for future contract revenue. Oracle reported remaining performance obligation of $455 billion, more than tripling from $137.8 billion the previous quarter. Oracle estimates that its cloud infrastructure revenues will grow to $144 billion over the next five years. Oracle intends to increase capital spending to $35 billion in fiscal 2026.
OpenAI Launches New Product Wave
OpenAI, a leader in developing AI systems, is making plenty news. OpenAI on Oct. 6 announced a big deal with chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and rolled out a slew of new products at its annual developer’s day. OpenAI unveiled new capabilities for building apps inside ChatGPT. Further, ChatGPT users will be able to launch apps by starting a message with the name of an available app. In addition, ChatGPT will suggest apps when they are relevant to an ongoing conversation. Software companies took part in the event, including Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow.
OpenAI, which recently introduced the Sora 2 video app, has been on a roll. It’s been leveraging its newest AI models, including GPT-5. Also, has released a new feature that enables ChatGPT users to purchase items directly within the chatbot interface. OpenAI recently launched five agents targeting use cases such as contract review, personalized sales responses, customer support and ticket handling — pressuring software stocks.
Meanwhile, a group of investors recently paid about $6.6 billion to buy shares owned by OpenAI employees, valuing the company at $500 billion. Also, OpenAI has become one of the world’s most valuable startup, overtaking Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In the secondary market, OpenAI shares are sold on Forge Global, EquityZen and Zanbato and other platforms that trade private company equity.
Nvidia Makes Big OpenAI Investment
A bellwether for AI stocks, chip maker Nvidia has advanced 36% in 2025, rebounding from a big sell-off tied to China-based DeepSeek’s AI models.
Nvidia announced plans to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. As part of the deal, OpenAI will make cash purchases of Nvidia’s advanced hardware systems. Nvidia will take an equity stake in OpenAI.
The first $10 billion of Nvidia’s investment will be deployed at the completion of the first gigawatt of AI systems deployed in new data centers, which OpenAI said would occur in the second half of 2026, around the time Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform will roll out. Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each data center gigawatt is deployed.
Meanwhile, Broadcom (AVGO) stock has advanced 40% in 2025. Broadcom also has signed a big deal with OpenAI, analysts say. Further, when reporting Q2 results, Broadcom issued a strong outlook on AI chip sales.
Meanwhile, AMD stock surged on the new OpenAI deal. Under the deal, OpenAI will deploy six gigawatts of AMD AI systems over several years beginning in late 2026. AMD stated the deal could be a $100 billion revenue opportunity in the long run. Also, AMD stock has advanced 78% this year.
AI Stocks To Watch: Palantir, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike
Among AI stocks to watch: Palantir stock has gained 131% in 2025 but has retreated from its all-time high of 190 set on Aug. 12. Despite investor worries over AI internet search competition, Google stock is up nearly 25% in 2025. Microsoft stock has advanced 25%.
Shares in CrowdStrike Holdings (CRWD) have gained 44% in 2025. CrowdStrike aims to be a leader in AI cybersecurity.
Meanwhile, shares in Cloudflare (NET) have shot up 98% in 2025. To protect their content, Cloudflare recently began giving web domains the option to block AI crawlers. Here’s an interview with Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince.
‘Neocloud’ Companies Emerge
CoreWeave stock has advanced 245% this year but shares pulled back following the expiration of its IPO lock-up and earnings report. CoreWeave stock hit an all-time high on June 20, with shares up 367% at that point.
Further, CoreWeave is a new AI cloud services provider that rents out Nvidia GPU-equipped servers. Its customers include OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia. Meta also plans to buy more AI cloud capacity from CoreWeave.
See The Latest Updates To IBD Watchlists
Other new AI cloud infrastructure providers, also called “neoclouds,” include Nebius (NBIS), Lambda, Crusoe and Nscale. Lambda is expected to launch an initial public offering.
Among data center infrastructure plays, Arista Networks (ANET) has shot up 39% this year. Arista stock gained following the company’s Q2 earnings report. Here’s an interview with Arista Chief Executive Jayshree Ullal on its AI strategy.
Ciena (CIEN), Credo Technology (CRDO) and Lumentum (LITE) also have advanced on robust internet data center orders.
“Scale-up” networking is a big trend for AI stocks, says Morgan Stanley.
“The scale-up network refers to high-speed communication between GPUs/accelerators in the same server or rack. Interconnecting accelerators allows them to function as one large supercomputer, accessing the same memory and processing the same workload,” said a Morgan Stanley report.
AI Stocks: Software Companies Lag
Having struggled to generate new revenue from “copilots,” software companies are now turning to autonomous, goal-driven AI agents. One big issue for software companies is how fast customers ramp up pilot programs to commercial deployment.
Software companies that help customers clean up and organize their proprietary data to train AI models and build AI apps have out-performed.
Palantir — as well as Snowflake and privately held Databricks — are data management software plays. Here’s a look at Databrick’s strategy. Snowflake stock has advanced 56% this year. Snowflake reported better-than-expected Q2 earnings.
On the other hand, some big-cap software companies are not the top-performing AI stocks. There’s growing investor angst over the “per seat” licensing business models of some software companies if artificial intelligence improves productivity but results in the elimination of jobs. That potentially means less per-seat software licenses.
Another investor concern is that more companies could develop custom software in-house using generative AI coding tools. And, there’s increasing concern that OpenAI will compete with enterprise software makers.
Salesforce (CRM) stock has retreated 28% in 2025 while ServiceNow (NOW) stock is down 16%.
Adobe (ADBE), Workday (WDAY) and HubSpot (HUBS) are also among software companies in the red this year.
Meta’s Big Bet On Scale AI
Meanwhile, Meta stock has gained 20% in 2025.
Meta continues to overhaul its AI strategy. Meta has invested $14.9 billion in Scale AI for a 49% stake in the startup. Scale AI provides data labeling services that help train and produce AI large language models.
Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang has joined a new AI research lab at Meta dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence.” And, Meta has hired away top scientists from OpenAI, Google and others.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has laid out five pillars of expected AI growth. They include improved advertising, engaging social media experiences, business messaging, the Meta AI app, and AI devices, including spatial computing.
The social networking giant in April launched the Meta AI app, built with its Llama 4 training model, with chatbot and web-searching features. Previously, Llama had been embedded in Meta applications such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta in April released its open source Llama 4 AI model family.
On the negative side, analysts say Meta has relinguished its mantle as the leader in open-source AI to Chinese companies, led by DeepSeek.
AI Native Startups Gain Momentum
Apple stock has rebounded and is down 2% in 2025. The company has been losing top AI scientists. According to reports, Apple is developing a new AI-powered web search feature for Siri, powered by a customized version of Google’s Gemini model.
Apple’s fall product launch event, including iPhone 17 models, met expectations for new hardware but included minimal discussion of new artificial intelligence capabilities.
Investors should keep a close watch on the fierce competition in AI models. Generally, the AI models are battling in reasoning and multimodal capabilities as well as computing needs. Large language models provide the building blocks to develop applications.
Anthropic’s latest funding round values it at $61.5 billion. Amazon is a big investor in Anthropic.
The commoditization of AI models could spur application development. While “training” AI models has been the biggest driver of capital spending, the market will shift to “inferencing,” or running AI applications, in the long run.
According to the State of AI Report 2025, large labs and AI startups are now generating close to $20billion in annual revenue.
AI Stocks To Watch By Industry Group
| Company | Symbol | Comp Rating | Industry name | AI angle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | (NVDA) | 99 | Elec-Semiconductor Fabless | Cloud computing giants buying more chips to train AI models or run AI workloads. Big lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). |
| CrowdStrike | (CRWD) | 91 | Computer Software-Security | AI chatbots expected to automate more functions in security-operations centers and reduce the time to detect computer hacking. |
| Arista Networks | (ANET) | 99 | Computer-Networking | Sells computer network switches that speed up communications among racks of computer servers packed into “hyperscale” data centers. With AI growth, internet data centers will need more network bandwidth. |
| Microsoft | (MSFT) | 97 | Computer Software-Desktop | Biggest investor in generative AI startup Open AI, whose ChatGPT users require Azure cloud services. Microsoft’s business AI assistant, Office 365 Copilot, is another potential revenue source. |
| Salesforce | (CRM) | 67 | Computer Software-Enterprise | Pivoted to autonomous, goal-driven AI agents from conversational co-pilots. Expected to use a mix of subscription and consumption-based pricing. |
| Amazon.com | (AMZN) | 88 | Retail-Internet | Alexa smart assistant upgraded. Cloud computing unit working with OpenAI rivals Anthropic, Hugging Face and Falcon 40B. |
Follow Reinhardt Krause on X, formerly Twitter, @reinhardtk_tech for updates on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:
Want To Trade Options? Here Are The Basics To Get You Started
IBD Digital: Unlock IBD’s Premium Stock Lists, Tools And Analysis Today
Learn How To Time The Market With IBD’s ETF Market Strategy
Monitor IBD’s “Breaking Out Today” List For Companies Hitting New Buy Points
