Stock splits multiply or divide a company's outstanding share count and thus change each share's price, but they don't change its overall market capitalization. When splits occur (especially forward splits), they can be a nice catalyst for the stock, as they tend to make share prices more accessible to the average investor. As such, buying a stock ahead of a split can sometimes be a good move for investors.
Let's look at three stocks I think are set to enact stock splits next year.
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Meta Platforms
Meta Platforms (META 1.43%) is the only "Magnificent Seven" stock to have never split its stock. However, with a stock price starting to approach $700, 2026 could be the year Meta management pulls the trigger and splits its stock.
Such a move could help evoke management's confidence in its stock at a time it wants the market to trust its large artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure spending plans. It also made a smart move by saying it will reduce spending on metaverse projects, as it would be difficult to aggressively pursue both at the same time.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
Meanwhile, the company has been seeing good traction from its AI spending, which has been helping drive its ad revenue. It's using its proprietary Llama AI model to improve its recommendation algorithm, which keeps users on its apps longer, as well as helps advertisers create better campaigns and improve targeting. This helped power a 26% increase in revenue last quarter.
ASML
With its stock price over $1,000, ASML (ASML 0.74%) is another company that looks poised to split its stock in 2026. The company last had a forward stock split all the way back in April 2000, when it did a 3:1 split. At the time, its price was around $109 (split adjusted) before the split.
Given its stock price, a stock split looks overdue. Meanwhile, it could help get investors excited for one of the most under-the-radar AI plays in the market. The company owns a monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which is the technology needed to make advanced semiconductor chips such as graphics processing units (GPUs). Quite simply, without its EUV machines, there would be no AI boom.
NASDAQ: ASML
Key Data Points
Given the current AI infrastructure buildout, ASML is well-positioned, and it would benefit from any other technological advancements that also need advanced chips, such as self-driving cars and quantum computing. It has also already developed a new generation of lithography technology called High-NA EUV (high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography) that will be able to shrink node sizes (the transistor density on chips) even further. Costing around $400 million per machine, they are nearly double the cost of its current EUV machines.
CrowdStrike
With a price of over $500 as of this writing, CrowdStrike (CRWD +0.70%) is another tech leader that could split its stock next year. Like Meta Platforms, it has never previously split its stock.
However, with a high stock price and the cybersecurity company starting to see its annual recurring revenue (ARR) begin to reaccelerate, next year could be a great time to split the stock to show investors management's confidence in its business moving forward.
NASDAQ: CRWD
Key Data Points
CrowdStrike was dealt a blow after a big IT outage in 2024 hurt its reputation, leading to its growth decelerating for much of the past two years. However, the company took the mistake as an opportunity to introduce a new flexible license spending model, called Falcon Flex, and gave impacted customers credits to try new modules. Falcon Flex, which lets customers use and pay for CrowdStrike's cybersecurity models only when they are needed, has begun to resonate with customers, which led to its ARR growth accelerating to 23% last quarter.
The company is seeing strong momentum with its next-generation solutions, and customers continue to add new modules. In the third quarter, nearly half of its customers were using six or more of its modules, and nearly a quarter were using eight or more.
