Growth stocks continue to drive the market higher, led by companies in the technology sector. With the market heating up, now is still a great time to add some growth names to your portfolio.
Let's look at five great options to buy this year.
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1. Advanced Micro Devices
While a distant second to Nvidia in the graphics processing unit (GPU) space, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 0.69%) has found a niche in the inference market. For example, last quarter it said one of the largest artificial intelligence (AI) model companies in the world was using its GPUs to run a significant portion of its daily inference. This is important, as the inference market is eventually expected to greatly outgrow the market for training.
This is a huge opportunity for AMD given its smaller size. In the first quarter, Nvidia's data center revenue topped $39 billion, while AMD's was just $3.7 billion. Because of this, even small market share gains could result in huge growth.
To help with this, the company is part of consortium -- along with Intel, Broadcom (AVGO 1.23%), and many others -- that has created a new open interconnect standard called UALink to compete with Nvidia's proprietary NVLink standard. If UALink becomes the new standard, it would enable customers to mix and match AI chips from different vendors. That would be a huge victory for AMD.
With inference demand poised to overtake training and AMD's clear growth runway, this is a stock that still has plenty of room to run.
2. Broadcom
Instead of chasing Nvidia in the GPU market like AMD, Broadcom is focused on custom chips and networking infrastructure. The company's networking portfolio has seen strong growth, as its components are important in helping transfer massive data volumes across huge AI clusters. This led to its AI networking revenue surging 70% in Q1.
Its biggest opportunity, though, lies in custom AI chips. Broadcom helped Alphabet design its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and it is now working with several major hyperscalers (owners of massive data centers) on their own custom chips. Given the upfront costs of designing custom chips, these tend to be for big deployments. Broadcom has said that its three custom chip customers furthest along represent a $60 billion to $90 billion serviceable market opportunity in fiscal 2027 alone.
Not to be overlooked is Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. Its Cloud Foundation platform is becoming an essential tool for managing AI workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments. Since the acquisition, Broadcom has moved VMware to a subscription model, creating a nice recurring revenue stream.
With AI networking, custom chips, and virtualization, Broadcom is turning into a premier AI company.
3. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM 0.78%) is at the heart of the global semiconductor supply chain. It manufactures the world's most advanced semiconductors for the top chip designers in the world. Its unmatched scale and technological expertise have created a moat in the manufacturing of advanced chips.
Rival Intel continues to burn cash trying to build a foundry business, while Samsung's yield issues have given TSMC a massive lead in the advanced-node space. Nodes refer to the size of the transistors used on a chip, measured in nanometers.
Smaller nodes, which improve chip performance and power efficiency, are driving TSMC's growth. Chips built on 7nm technology and below account for the vast majority of TSMC's revenue, and Apple has locked up a large chunk of its future 2nm output. Even Intel has tapped TSMC's 3nm technology for some of own high-end chips.
Demand for AI chips isn't slowing and autonomous driving has the potential to be the next big semiconductor market. At the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins the battle for AI chips, TSMC is positioned to benefit regardless.
4. Pinterest
Pinterest (PINS 2.56%) has been working behind the scenes to transform its online vision board into a more shoppable platform that is becoming increasingly attractive to brands and advertisers. A big part of this push is coming from AI.
It built a multimodal AI model that understands both images and text. This allows the company to better personalize content, while also helping power its new visual search tool. With visual search, users can now click on specific part of an image, such as a handbag a woman is holding, and find direct checkout links to retailers for that exact bag or ones that are similar. These efforts have helped turn Pinterest into a more transactional platform.
The front end isn't the only area that Pinterest has focused on. It's looking for its new AI-driven advertising solution, Performance+, to help growth moving forward. Performance+ uses AI and automation to make advertising on its platform less labor intensive and more effective. It helps advertisers with everything from creative to ad targeting, bidding, and budget optimization.
Pinterest has a massive global user base, which arguably has long been under-monetized. If the company can continue execute on its vision, the stock has a lot of upside ahead.
5. Toast
Toast (TOST 1.35%) is more than just a restaurant point-of-sale system, it's becoming the software backbone for the restaurant industry.
The company continues to roll out new tools designed to streamline operations and help increase restaurant sales. Recent launches include AI features like ToastIQ and its "sous chef" assistant, which can help restaurants make better decisions and improve the customer experience.
Meanwhile, Toast benefits directly from restaurant success. It earns a cut of customer sales via payment processing, so every operational improvement that drives more sales also helps Toast. The company added more than 6,000 new restaurant locations in Q1, and is now serving more than 140,000 sites.
Importantly, it's starting to expand beyond local restaurants. It recently landed deals with Applebee's and Topgolf Callaway and is making early progress internationally. It's also gotten a foothold into adjacent markets like hotel restaurants and bars, as well as food retailers.
While competition and the economy are worth watching, Toast's momentum and product innovation put it in a great position to be a long-term winner.
