Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to be the growth engine of the current bull market. And with AI still looking like it is in its early innings, it's not too late to scoop up the stocks of some AI leaders. Let's look at three no-brainer AI stocks to buy right now.
Broadcom
Broadcom (AVGO +0.33%) has one of the clearest growth paths ahead of it of any AI stock in the market. This all stems from becoming the go-to company to help customers design custom AI chips It helped Alphabet design its tensor processing units (TPUs), which have become one of the strongest chip alternatives to Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs).
NASDAQ: AVGO
Key Data Points
Designing custom chips, called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits), requires time and a lot of upfront costs, so when Broadcom gets an order to help design these chips, they are typically for large deployments. It sees its three custom AI chip customers that are the furthest along as representing a more than $60 billion opportunity in fiscal 2027, which is nearly double its entire revenue this fiscal year.
Meanwhile, a fourth customer placed a $10 billion order for next year, and it recently signed a large deal with OpenAI. With growth set to explode higher, this is a stock to buy.
Meta Platforms
Investors have turned on Meta Platforms (META 0.84%), but it has nothing to do with the company's growth. Instead, it has more to do with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's spending. After years of heavy investing by the company in the metaverse with nothing much but big losses to show for it, investors are not happy that he's ramping up AI spending.
However, AI has been helping to power the company's results, so it does look like this spending is bearing some fruit. Meta's social media sites today are much more about entertainment than connecting with friends and acquaintances, and they're using AI to help feed users more content that they are interested in. This is leading to users spending more time on its apps, which in turn creates more ad inventory.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
At the same time, Meta Platforms is also using AI to help improve the creativity of the ads on its platform and to better target users, which is making its ads more effective. This can be seen in the company's results, where in Q3 its ad impression climbed 14% and its average ad price jumped 10%.
Meanwhile, the company is just in the very early innings of starting to serve ads on its WhatsApp and Threads platforms. Monetizing these properties should provide a nice growth tailwind in the coming years.
Whether or not Zuckerberg's grander AI vision comes to pass, investors are essentially getting a call option on it at this point. With the pullback in the stock, now looks like a great time to pick up some shares.
Image source: Getty Images.
GitLab
Another beaten-down AI stock to pick up is GitLab (GTLB 2.49%). For those unfamiliar with the company, it operates a DevSecOps platform, which developers use to securely write and store code, although it has been transforming itself with AI more into a comprehensive software development lifecycle (SDLC) company.
GitLab has done this through its Duo Agent solution, which uses AI agents to help developers across all aspects of their daily activities, including writing code and performing other tasks to free up their time.
NASDAQ: GTLB
Key Data Points
While the stock has struggled over the past year, it's not due to its revenue growth (over 25% quarterly revenue growth the past two years), gross margins (near 90%), or valuation (a price-to-sales multiple of under 6.5 based on 2026 analyst estimates). Meanwhile, the switch to a hybrid seat-plus-usage pricing model should help spur growth, as it can now grow more with usage.
There have also been rumors that the company could be a takeout target. Right now, GitLab's stock is way too cheap given its growth prospects, making it a no-brainer buy.
