The market has returned to its highs, along with many top artificial intelligence (AI) names. However, another market dip could always be around the corner.
Let's look at three top AI stocks that have made strong runs that would be good buys on a pullback.
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1. Palantir
With a high valuation but attractive growth opportunities, Palantir Technologies (PLTR -0.34%) is a stock that would be attractive on a dip. The company has emerged as one of the market's most compelling AI growth stories, and its momentum has been gaining speed.
In the first quarter, Palantir posted its seventh consecutive period of accelerating growth, with revenue up 39%. The rise is being led by its U.S. commercial segments, which saw sales jump 71% and the value of future deals soar 127%.
While there is a lot of talk about which company is building the best AI model, Palantir is focused on something far more practical: making AI useful. Its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) uses AI models to help solve real-world problems.
AIP does this by gathering data and then connecting it to physical assets and operational workflows, allowing companies to make AI more useful. As a result, the platform is being used for a growing list of purposes, including hospitals monitoring for sepsis, insurers using it in their underwriting, and energy companies optimizing their pipeline infrastructure.
The company's largest customer is the U.S. government, which is starting to embrace AI to become more efficient. Last quarter, Palantir's government revenue climbed 45%.
The company also recently landed a major deal with NATO, expanding into international defense just as Europe ramps up military spending. That gives it three potential growth engines: domestic commercial enterprises, the U.S. government, and now the international public sector.
Yes, the stock is expensive by traditional metrics, but Palantir looks like it's laying the groundwork to become one of the next megacaps. As such, any pullback could be a great buying opportunity.
2. Nvidia
Nvidia (NVDA -0.42%) has once again been helping lead the market higher. The company recently got good news when the Trump administration said the U.S. would ease chip export controls, allowing the company to resume selling its H20 chips to China. This will add billions in revenue.
Nvidia remains the undisputed champion of AI infrastructure, with its graphics processing units (GPUs) the backbone of this build-out due to their fast processing speeds. And the company has sped up its development cycle to ensure it remains on top.
Over the past two years, data center revenue has exploded from $4.3 billion to more than $39 billion -- incredible growth for a company the size of Nvidia. It held a 92% share in the GPU market in the first quarter.
Its chips drive sales, but its secret weapon is its CUDA software. The company created the free platform in 2006 as a way to expand the use of GPUs beyond their original purpose of speeding up graphics in video games.
While it was slow to play out in other end markets, Nvidia smartly pushed CUDA into academia and research labs, where early AI research was being done. That led developers to build directly on CUDA, leading to a growing collection of tools and libraries designed to maximize GPU performance for AI workloads.
If shares of Nvidia dip, be ready to pounce. Data center spending continues to ramp up, and the company has a big opportunity in the automotive market, too, as autonomous and smart vehicles start to become more prevalent.
3. Microsoft
Another company that has seen its stock run up in price is Microsoft (MSFT -0.33%). It dominates the enterprise software space with its Microsoft 365 suite of worker productivity products and has one of the leading cloud computing companies in Azure.
The cloud remains the company's fastest-growing business, with the unit producing revenue growth of 30% or more each of the past seven quarters. Azure revenue jumped 33% last quarter (35% in constant currency), with nearly half of that coming from AI services. Growth could have been even higher, but Microsoft has been hitting capacity constraints.
As such, it plans to ramp up capital expenditures (capex) in fiscal 2026 with a focus on adding GPUs and servers. It said those assets are more directly tied to AI revenue than buying the buildings that house them. That's a smart move that should support continued cloud computing momentum.
Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI gave it an early AI lead, especially with Azure initially being granted exclusive access to its leading large language models (LLMs). Companies continue to be attracted to OpenAI's popular AI models, and Azure gives its customers direct access to them.
It has also embedded OpenAI's models throughout its ecosystem to run its Copilot, which is gaining popularity with businesses. At $30 per enterprise user per month, it offers a lot of strong upside.
That said, the OpenAI partnership is getting complicated. The exclusivity deal is over, and the two sides are reportedly negotiating new terms as the AI provider looks to restructure. Still, Microsoft remains entitled to 49% of OpenAI Global's profits up to a tenfold return on its investment -- potentially a huge payday.
Microsoft remains in a strong long-term position. The stock's recent run-up makes it an attractive candidate to buy on any pullback.
