The technology sector has significantly outperformed the broader market over the past decade, and that outperformance continues to run its course in 2025. Year to date, the Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector index is up 13%, beating the S&P 500's return of about 7% at the time of this writing.
Investing in competitively positioned tech leaders has been a wealth-building strategy for many years, and that opportunity is certainly alive and well as companies adopt new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Here are two top tech stocks that can outperform the market in 2025 and for years to come.
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1. Meta Platforms
Shares of Meta Platforms (META -0.15%) are up 32% this year, outpacing the Nasdaq Composite's 9% gain, supported by strong financial results. The company's large user base of 3.4 billion daily active users continues to be a magnet for advertisers. As Meta continues to transform into an AI-driven business, the stock has a lot of room to run over the long term.
Meta's investments in AI, including powerful tools for advertisers, have significantly increased the value of its platforms. Revenue grew 22% year over year in Q2, an acceleration over the 16% increase to start the year. AI is driving more personalization across its family of apps, and this is leading to growth in both ad impressions and the average price per ad.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has the business investing heavily in AI infrastructure to support greater personalization across its platforms. Its recent financial results show why this is crucial to its long-term prospects. The more personalization it can offer users, the stronger its competitive moat becomes, which will lead to more shareholder returns.
Meta has reportedly been offering pay packages with $100 million signing bonuses to poach top engineers from other tech companies. The race to hire top talent is causing accelerating research and development expenses, which includes employee compensation. This is a major trend spreading across the tech sector, but Meta's cost management has been exceptional. Despite R&D expense shooting to the Moon, earnings per share grew 37% year over year in Q2.
Meta Platforms is in a strong financial position. It ended the second quarter with $18 billion of net cash on the balance sheet, and it generated $50 billion in free cash flow over the past four quarters. Despite the company's growth, the stock trades at a reasonable forward earnings multiple of 27, which is less than its recent earnings growth rate and should support market-beating returns.
2. Reddit
Reddit (RDDT 1.11%) is benefiting from growth in the digital advertising market with its community-driven platform. This gives it a unique advantage against other social media platforms, and it's still growing off a relatively small base of revenue that could drive wealth-building returns for investors.
The user-created content and high engagement from its growing community of 110 million daily active users is a significant competitive advantage for Reddit. Revenue grew 78% year over year in Q2, which follows a 61% increase in Q1. This is outpacing the growth in its user base, which was up 21% year over year last quarter.
This signals that the investments which management is making in product improvements and the user experience are leading to growing engagement and higher average revenue per user (ARPU), similar to what Meta Platforms is seeing.
Reddit's ARPU growth has accelerated from just a 2% year-over-year increase in Q2 2024 to 47% in Q2 2025. The company is leveraging the valuable data that users create across the platform to help businesses tailor their ad strategies for maximum returns on ad spending. Reddit has an incredibly strong advantage here, since many of the discussion threads are infinitely varied across hobbies, shopping, and learning new things, providing a lot of valuable data on user interests.
The company's focus on improving the platform with new features, such as the AI-driven search tool Reddit Answers, should continue to drive engagement on the platform. Its improving ARPU growth may have a long way to run, which could benefit the stock.
The value that users get out of a platform with an infinite number of topics and information sharing can drive significant growth over the long term. Reddit is nowhere close to reaching its potential. It reported $499 million in quarterly revenue, or an annual run rate of about $2 billion, out of $276 billion annually spent on advertising across the social media market, according to Statista.
All this makes Reddit stock an excellent buy after falling from its previous highs this year.
