Artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be a game-changing technology that is still in its early innings, and the tech sector’s pullback in recent weeks has opened up opportunities for investors to scoop up some bargains among the players in that space.
Here are three that look like no-brainer AI stocks to buy right now.
Nvidia(NASDAQ: NVDA) has been the poster child of AI, and its industry-leading hardware has helped it become one of the largest companies in the world. However, its stock was also one of those that was most punished in the recent tech sell-off.
Yet its strong attributes haven’t changed, nor has the AI infrastructure buildout story. Nvidia is the dominant maker of graphic processing units (GPUs), which are the primary chips used to train AI models and run AI inference due to their impressive parallel processing power. These chips were originally designed to improve graphics rendering in video games, but the company created a free software platform called CUDA that allows developers to program GPUs — but only Nvidia’s GPUs — to perform other tasks.
As a result, most developers who learned to program GPUs did so with CUDA, which made switching to any other hardware provider difficult. The company has since built a collection of microservices and libraries specifically for AI. In sum, these moves have given the company a huge moat, as demonstrated by its 90% market share in the GPU space.
Meanwhile, spending on AI infrastructure continues to rise. Cloud computing infrastructure providers are aggressively expanding AI processing capacities to keep up with demand, while companies developing AI models are demanding exponentially more computing power (and thus GPUs). This all suggests that Nvidia should have another strong year of growth in 2025.
Meanwhile, the recent pullback in the stock has left Nvidia’s shares at attractive valuations. It trades at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 25 times 2025 analyst estimates and a price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio of under 0.5. Positive PEG ratios below 1 are generally viewed as indicating an undervalued stock.
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Trading at a forward P/E ratio of 18.5, Alphabet(NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG) is another AI stock that has been tossed in the bargain bin. Nonetheless, it owns a great set of leading businesses as well as some attractive emerging businesses.
The company’s cloud computing unit has been its strongest grower thanks to AI-related demand. The unit’s revenue climbed 30% last quarter and its profitability has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, Alphabet has developed its own custom AI chips with the help of Broadcom, and says that hardware is helping improve inference times and lower costs. That’s helping give Alphabet a nice cost advantage that should allow the company to continue to nicely leverage its massive cloud business.
Alphabet is also beginning to incorporate its new Gemini 2.0 AI model throughout its business, including in Google search. This should allow it to serve up more useful search results as well as improve its AI Overviews.
While some investors remain worried about the impact that the use of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT could have on the traditional search business, Google has historically only served up ads in connection to 20% of its queries. New ad forms attached to AI-generated results should allow it to better monetize the large percentage of searches for which it currently does not serve ads.
In addition, the company has the most watched video platform in the world (YouTube), a strong digital ad network, and emerging business opportunities in quantum computing and robotaxis (Waymo).
Salesforce(NYSE: CRM) is the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, and has also entered the automation, analytics, and employee communication markets through its acquisitions of Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack. However, it expects agentic AI to be its next big growth driver.
Agentic AI is the next evolution of AI beyond generative AI. With generative AI programs such as Gemini or ChatGPT, users enter prompts and the AI programs respond by creating content in the form of text, images, or video. Agentic AI will take the use cases a step further by creating AI agents that perform an array of tasks based on initial instructions with little human oversight needed.
Salesforce is getting into agentic AI with its new Agentforce offering. It was only introduced in October, but the company already has 5,000 Agentforce deals in place, including 3,000 paying deals. The company offers out-of-the-box AI agents that can handle specific tasks, such as customer service interactions, while also offering no-code and low-code tools within its solution that can be used to customize its AI agents.
Agentforce is a consumption-based product that costs $2 per interaction. As such, the more useful its agents become and the more its customers use them, the bigger the opportunity for Salesforce. It also just launched AgentExchange to help further expand use cases with more than 200 initial partners and hundreds of prebuilt apps, actions, integrations, and templates.
The stock is attractively valued at a forward P/E of 26. Software-as-a-service businesses typically command high valuations due to the recurring and predictable nature of their revenue.
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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Nvidia, and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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