The stock market, and more specifically the technology sector, is flying high after a strong 2025. But while certain AI-related stocks are soaring, not every single tech stock has been winning of late. In fact, even some high-quality companies with long growth runways look downright cheap for one reason or another today.
Here are two left-behind tech leaders that investors can still buy today, in late January 2026.
Image source: Getty Images.
T-Mobile
T-Mobile (TMUS +1.06%) shareholders are likely to be frustrated with the stock's recent performance. Shares are down roughly 33% from all-time highs of $276.49 reached a little less than a year ago.
What's doubly frustrating is that T-Mobile has posted stellar earnings results over that period. The company just trounced postpaid net additions expectations in the third quarter, with its highest quarterly net additions in its history, and also outperformed on postpaid phone net adds, which were the highest in a decade and the best in the industry.
Still, the market appears concerned about the sustainability of these excellent results. One issue is that CEO Mike Sievert announced he was stepping down back in September, with Chief Operating Officer Srini Gopalan taking over CEO duties on Nov. 1.
While CEO transitions are sometimes met with skepticism, this one seems planned. Sievert himself was COO before taking over as CEO, and his tenure worked out very well for T-Mobile shareholders. Gopalan was also previously the CEO of Deutsche Telekom (DTEGY 0.09%) Germany, where he helped Deutsche successfully accelerate growth and capture market share.
T-Mobile also completed its midsize $4.3 billion acquisition of U.S. Cellular in August, and increased its capital expenditure target for the year to integrate these new assets. Investors may not have liked the buy, thinking that T-Mobile now needs to acquire its way to growth. And modestly increased capital expenditures will slightly weigh on near-term cash profits.
However, T-Mobile has a strong track record of realizing synergies from acquisitions. Its 2020 acquisition of Sprint was a home run, vaulting T-Mobile ahead of competitors in 5G performance, while also enabling significant cost savings.
The stock has fallen back to just a $209 billion market cap, with an adjusted free cash flow guidance for 2025 of $17.9 billion at the midpoint, good for just an 11.7 price-to-free cash flow multiple. But T-Mobile's industry leadership, strong operating history, growth outlook, and ample capital returns with high share repurchases likely warrant a multiple well above that.
In short, T-Mobile is a defensive stock one can buy with confidence on the recent discount.
NASDAQ: SMCI
Key Data Points
Super Micro Computer
Server maker Super Micro Computer (SMCI 2.84%) has had a wild ride over the past few years, but recently, the stock sold off following its third-quarter earnings. The main issues in 2025 were the company's uneven growth and disappointing margins, even as the AI buildout continues apace.
But these issues appear to be temporary short-term delays, not problems with demand or the longer-term picture.
First, Super Micro has landed huge major customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and several neoclouds to deploy Nvidia's (NVDA 0.65%) latest and greatest chips. In 2025, those massive customers delayed some data center decisions because of shifting architecture decisions at the customer, while Nvidia experienced some delays in ramping production of its Blackwell chip. As such, revenue disappointed, and gross margins were under pressure.
Yet while Super Micro's September quarter saw just $5.0 billion in revenue, which was actually down year-over-year, management guided for $10.0 billion to $11.0 billion in revenue in the December quarter, good for over 100% quarter-over-quarter growth, while raising its full-year guidance (ending in June) from $33 billion to $36 billion. That would amount to 63% revenue growth over fiscal 2025.
Meanwhile, the company has some initiatives underway to improve margins. One will be through diversifying its large customers, who currently have buying power because of their massive volumes. At an industry conference in December, Senior Vice President Michael Staiger noted that the company had four large 10%-plus customers but predicted it would add another two to four in fiscal 2026. More large customers means Super Micro can perhaps charge a bit more per customer, since it's no longer dependent on a narrower set.
This year should also see the scaling of Super Micro's data center building block solutions, a standardized modular platform that Super Micro can deploy extremely quickly relative to competitors, and that management says will be a higher-margin product.
Finally, AI is now rapidly expanding from training in data centers to inferencing in enterprises and at the edge, with traditional CPUs now seeing some of their strongest demand in years. This should also help Super Micro, which also makes traditional servers, which likely garner higher margins than large AI data center servers. On Jan. 6, Super Micro unveiled several new edge platforms that included not only Nvidia chips but also traditional x86 CPUs, which are now in very high demand. This should not only bolster growth but also margins.
Meanwhile, the stock now trades at just 25 times trailing earnings and 16.7 times this year's earnings estimates, which is relatively low for a company growing that fast, and with the potential to re-expand margins.
