While the market has continued its winning ways to start the year, there are still some attractive investment opportunities -- even in the technology sector. Technology continues to help shape the world we live in and artificial intelligence (AI) appears to have the potential to be a game changer for multiple sectors of the economy. That suggests there are opportunities to be had for those with cash available to invest.
Whether you have $50,000 or $5,000 to invest, there are technology growth stocks you can invest in right now. Here's a look at three of them.
1. Nvidia
The leader in AI infrastructure, Nvidia's (NVDA +2.58%) graphics processing units (GPUs) provide the computing power needed to train AI models and run inference. The company has taken a huge 90% market share in the GPU space due largely to its CUDA software platform, which makes it easy for developers to program its chips for various AI tasks through CUDA X, a collection of AI-focused microservices, libraries, and tools built on top of its CUDA platform.
NASDAQ: NVDA
Key Data Points
Nvidia continues to benefit from the increasing computing power needs of companies looking to advance their AI models. As these models advance, they are using exponentially more GPUs to be trained on. For example, Meta Platforms' (META +2.25%) Llama 4 AI model used 160,000 GPUs in its training, compared to only 16,000 for Llama 3. Meanwhile, there has been talk of companies using 1 million AI chip clusters in the near future.
In addition, cloud computing companies are greatly expanding their AI data center footprints to try to keep up with demand. Nvidia's largest customer, Microsoft, has plans to spend an astronomical $80 billion building out additional data centers this year.
Nvidia is on track to more than double its revenue for the second straight year in 2024 and is projected to grow its revenue by more than 50% in 2025. Despite this, the stock trades at a reasonable valuation, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 31 times based on fiscal 2026 estimates and a price/earnings-to-growth ratio (PEG) under 1, which is typically considered undervalued.
Image source: Getty Images.
2. Alphabet
While Alphabet (GOOGL +4.13%) (GOOG +4.03%) is one of the cheapest megacap tech stocks, the company has a lot to offer investors. It is the largest digital advertiser in the world, and its adtech platform serves ads both for its own properties as well as third parties. Its crown jewel is its Google search engine, which holds about a 90% global market share in search. While some AI-powered competitors have been emerging, no company has the search history data or scale with both users and advertisers that Google commands.
NASDAQ: GOOGL
Key Data Points
Meanwhile, Alphabet has its own big AI opportunity in front of it, with it historically only serving ads on approximately 20% of its searches. Creating new ad formats for its AI overviews would be a large incremental opportunity for the company down the line, allowing it to serve ads to much of the 80% of its searches it does not currently monetize.
Alphabet also owns the most viewed video streaming service in the world, YouTube. This is another huge advertising platform for the company. Unlike most other streaming services, YouTube doesn't have to pay upfront for content, instead using a revenue-sharing model with its content creators. YouTube Shorts, which are shorter videos similar to TikToks, is a nice opportunity, and the company is bringing AI video generation to help creators make videos for this platform.
Meanwhile, Alphabet's fastest-growing business is its cloud computing unit, which saw revenue surge 35% last quarter as the company helps organizations create their own AI models and applications. In addition, Alphabet has taken leadership positions in the emerging technologies of quantum computing and autonomous driving (Waymo).
Investors get this strong leadership and emerging business for a forward P/E of only 19.5 times 2025 analyst estimates.
3. Meta Platforms
Like Alphabet, Meta Platforms is a dominant player in digital advertising, currently the No. 2 in terms of market share. The company serves its ads through its social media and messaging platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Given the huge amount of data Meta has on its users, it can give advertisers very targeted audience demographics for their ad campaigns.
The company has done a great job over the years turning Facebook and Instagram into top destinations for users. Meanwhile, its newest platform, Threads, has been seeing strong growth, with 275 million users at the end of Q3 and growing by 1 million users a day. Overall, Meta has nearly 3.3 billion users who use one of its platforms on a daily basis.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
In addition to its huge user base, what Meta does better than any other social media platform is monetize its user base. It grew its family average revenue per person (ARPP) metric last quarter by 12% to $12.29. That is 4 times the average revenue per user (ARPU) of rival Snap and 7 times that of Pinterest. Meta does a particularly good job monetizing users outside of the U.S., which is an area where competitors have tended to struggle.
Meanwhile, Meta is investing heavily in AI, with its Llama large language model (LLM) powering its AI offering. It's seeing its AI-based recommendations lead to more time being spent on its platforms, including an 8% increase on Facebook and 6% on Instagram last quarter. Meta also offers AI adtech tools, such as image generation, to help advertisers improve ads and increase conversion. The company eventually hopes to integrate AI into future computing devices like smart glasses, while it is also still heavily investing in the metaverse.
The stock, meanwhile, is attractively priced at a forward P/E of under 22 times next year's analyst estimates.
