The Top Nine AI Stocks JC Is Watching

JC Parets here.

Everybody wants to know which AI stocks to buy.

I think that’s the wrong question.

AI isn’t a sector. It’s not one industry. And it certainly isn’t just a handful of semiconductor companies with “AI” somewhere in their investor presentation.

This is an infrastructure buildout.

We’re watching an entirely new technology stack get built in real time... 

Somebody has to make the chips. Somebody has to make the memory. Somebody has to supply the electricity and raw materials. Somebody has to build the data centers.

And then somebody has to actually use all this stuff to make more money.

That’s the part I think gets overlooked.

The internet wasn’t just a bet on Cisco Systems (CSCO). Eventually, the biggest winners included companies that figured out what to do with the internet once everybody had it.

I believe AI is going to work the same way.

And there’s another revolution happening alongside it that I talk about all the time: tokenization.

The lines between traditional finance and crypto are disappearing. Stocks, commodities, private companies and just about anything else of value are increasingly finding their way onto new financial rails.

To me, these aren’t separate stories.

It’s all part of the same massive technological transition happening underneath us.

So these are nine stocks I’m watching from different parts of that transformation.

Some are obvious.

Some aren’t.

And that’s what makes this fun.

Dave (DAVE)

Recent Price: $363.26
Market Cap: $4.6 Billion
Sector: Technology – Software

Dave is exactly the kind of company I mean when I say an AI stock doesn’t necessarily have to look like an AI stock.

This thing started as a budgeting app.

The original idea was pretty simple: help people avoid getting smoked by overdraft fees.

Today, Dave has more than 14 million members, and its ExtraCash product provides short-term advances to customers who need some breathing room between paychecks.

Here’s where AI comes in. Dave has something called CashAI.

The job of CashAI is basically to answer two questions:

Can we lend this person money? And, if we can, how much?

Banks have been trying to answer those questions forever. The difference is that Dave’s system can learn from enormous amounts of customer data and hopefully get better at answering them.

That’s where this gets interesting to me.

If Dave can approve more people and offer larger advances without getting crushed by bad loans, that’s a very different business.

You don’t necessarily need twice as many customers to double certain parts of the business.

You can simply become better at serving the customers you already have.

That’s one of the things I’m looking for throughout this AI boom.

Who gets smarter because of AI?

Dave might be one of them.

Palantir Technologies (PLTR)

Recent Price: $168.10
Market Cap: $404.4 Billion
Sector: Technology – Software

Palantir is probably closer to what most people picture when they hear “AI stock.”

But what interests me isn’t another chatbot.

It’s what happens when companies can actually put AI to work using their own information.

That’s what Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform is designed to do.

Imagine you’re running a giant company with information scattered everywhere. Sales has some of it. Operations has some. Manufacturing has some. Accounting has some.

Having an amazing AI model isn’t particularly useful if it can’t interact with the information you actually need to run the business.

Palantir is trying to connect those pieces.

And businesses are paying attention.

U.S. commercial revenue has been exploding, while Palantir’s government business continues to grow too.

That’s a powerful combination.

The U.S. government already trusted Palantir with some of its most important data. Now corporations are increasingly asking Palantir to help them make sense of theirs.

The stock certainly isn’t cheap.

Everybody knows the story now.

But expensive stocks can stay expensive for a very long time when the numbers keep justifying people’s enthusiasm.

That’s what I’m watching.

Oscar Health (OSCR)

Recent Price: $33.04
Market Cap: $9.7 Billion
Sector: Healthcare

Oscar is another one where I don’t think you should start with AI.

Start with how Americans work.

More people work for themselves. More people have side businesses. More people move between jobs.

The old model where everybody spends 30 years working for the same corporation and gets health insurance through that employer isn’t the world we live in anymore.

Oscar is built around that change.

Its membership is approaching 3 million people, and the company continues expanding into new markets.

Now add technology.

Insurance companies have an incredible amount of paperwork and data flowing through them. Claims need to be processed. Customers need to find doctors. Plans need to be priced. Providers need to get paid.

If AI can make those processes cheaper and more efficient, you don’t need AI to become the product.

AI makes the existing product better. That’s an important distinction.

Some of the biggest winners from AI may eventually be companies we never thought of as AI companies at all.

Oscar is a good example of what I’m talking about.

Teck Resources (TECK)

Recent Price: $66.56
Market Cap: $32 Billion
Sector: Materials – Copper

Now we’re getting into my kind of AI stock.

Copper.

You want artificial intelligence? Cool. Plug it in.

All those GPUs need electricity. The data centers need electricity. The power grid needs to get electricity to them. And all of that requires an enormous amount of copper.

We’ve been talking about this for years.

You can’t have an AI revolution without a massive physical buildout.

Teck is already one of the world’s largest copper producers, with major operations across the Americas.

And copper is increasingly becoming the center of the entire company.

There’s also another angle here that I find fascinating.

Canada has committed support toward expanding Teck’s production of critical minerals including germanium, gallium and antimony.

Those materials matter for advanced chips, electronics and defense.

While everybody else is staring at the newest AI model, I’m looking around asking, what does everybody building these models need to buy?

Copper is pretty high on that list.

Sometimes the best technology trade isn’t a technology company.

SK Hynix (SKHY)

Recent Price: $192.94
Market Cap: $1.3 Trillion
Sector: Technology – Semiconductors

If Nvidia is selling the brains of the AI buildout, somebody needs to provide the memory.

That’s SK Hynix.

High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, sits alongside the processors doing all these massive AI calculations. As the processors get more powerful, memory becomes increasingly important.

SK Hynix has become one of the most important companies in that market.

But here’s the part that has my attention.

Memory has historically been a nasty business.

Too much demand shows up, everybody builds more capacity, suddenly there’s too much supply, prices collapse and everybody wonders what happened.

We’ve seen that movie plenty of times.

AI could change some of those economics.

Customers are increasingly willing to make longer-term commitments because they’re desperate to know they’ll have enough supply.

If you’re SK Hynix, that’s enormously valuable.

Instead of guessing what customers might need years from now, those customers are increasingly telling you.

AI needs compute.

Compute needs memory.

And, right now, SK Hynix is sitting right in the middle of that chain.

SpaceX (SPCX)

Recent Price: $150.00
Market Cap: $1.9 Trillion
Sector: Aerospace & Defense

This one gets weird.

Which, naturally, is why I like it.

SpaceX already changed the economics of getting things into orbit.

Then Starlink changed what a satellite communications business could look like.

Now, Elon Musk wants to put AI infrastructure in space.

SpaceX is working with Nvidia on plans for a network of AI satellites called Starmind.

Think about what that means.

We’re spending extraordinary amounts of money building data centers here on Earth. Those facilities require huge amounts of land, power, cooling and infrastructure.

What if some of that computing eventually moves off the planet?

I don’t know exactly what that looks like 10 years from now.

Nobody does.

But I do know this:

If computing infrastructure starts moving into orbit, I’d rather pay attention to the company that’s already better at putting things into orbit than anybody else.

SpaceX isn’t just a rocket company anymore.

That’s what makes this so interesting.

Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR)

Recent Price: $11.20
Market Cap: $2.2 Billion
Sector: Financial Services

Now we get to the other side of this technological transition.

The financial rails.

Eventually we’re going to stop talking about TradFi and DeFi as if they’re two different worlds.

TradFi is short for “traditional finance.” DeFi is short for “decentralized finance.” Soon, it’s all just going to be finance.

Hyperliquid is one of the places where we’re already watching that happen.

I’ve used it on weekends to see where markets are trading when traditional exchanges are closed. Stocks. Commodities. Indexes. Even assets that historically weren’t available to trade this way.

That’s not some theoretical future anymore.

It’s happening.

PURR gives public-market investors exposure to the Hyperliquid ecosystem through a company that owns a substantial amount of HYPE.

But there’s an important difference between PURR and simply owning a pile of tokens.

Management can actually do something with the balance sheet.

It can earn returns on its holdings. It can buy more HYPE when management thinks it’s attractive. If PURR itself gets too cheap relative to what it owns, the company can potentially buy back its own shares.

Meanwhile, Hyperliquid uses much of the trading fees generated by the platform to buy HYPE.

Is this speculative?

Of course.

It’s one of the most speculative things on this list.

But if I’m right that more assets are going to trade around the clock and more of finance moves onto these new rails, I want exposure to the people building the rails.

Meta Platforms (META)

Recent Price: $653.51
Market Cap: $1.6 Trillion
Sector: Communication Services

Meta Platforms and Mark Zuckerberg are spending an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on AI.

And I don’t necessarily mean that as criticism.

The company expects to spend $130 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures this year.

That’s more than the annual economic output of some countries.

The obvious question is, how the hell do you make that money back?

Meta actually has a pretty straightforward answer.

Advertising.

More than 97% of Meta’s revenue already comes from ads.

If AI helps Instagram and Facebook show you things you’re more interested in, maybe you stay longer.

If AI helps advertisers create better ads and put those ads in front of the right people, maybe advertisers make more money.

If advertisers make more money, guess where they’re going to spend more money?

Meta doesn’t need to invent some magical new AI business for this investment to work.

It can use AI to make one of the greatest advertising machines ever built even better.

Zuckerberg obviously has bigger ambitions with superintelligence and new AI products.

We’ll see.

But don’t overlook what’s sitting right in front of us.

Meta already has billions of users.

Now they’re putting one of the largest AI investments on Earth behind monetizing them better.

Nvidia (NVDA)

Recent Price: $221.24
Market Cap: $5.2 Trillion
Sector: Technology – Semiconductors

And then there’s Papa Nvidia.

At this point, everybody knows Nvidia.

The interesting question isn’t whether Nvidia won the first phase of the AI boom.

It did.

The question is what comes next.

Blackwell has been the monster.

Now Vera Rubin is coming.

But I think it’s a mistake to think of Nvidia as simply a company that sells GPUs.

Look at everything Jensen Huang is building around those chips.

Networking.

Software.

Entire computing systems.

Nvidia increasingly wants to provide as much of the AI factory as possible.

That’s important because Google, Amazon, Microsoft and other giant customers aren’t stupid.

They don’t want to be dependent on one supplier forever. They’re developing their own chips and looking for alternatives wherever they can.

Of course they are.

But here’s the question I keep coming back to:

What if the pie itself gets so much bigger that it doesn’t matter?

If global spending on AI infrastructure continues exploding, Nvidia doesn’t necessarily need to own every chip sold.

It needs to remain one of the most important toll collectors on a highway that keeps adding lanes.

Last quarter, Nvidia generated more than $96 billion in revenue.

In three months.

Think about that.

This isn’t a science project anymore.

AI infrastructure is already one of the largest capital spending cycles we’ve ever seen.

And Nvidia is sitting right in the middle of it.

What I’m Really Watching

These nine companies couldn’t look more different.

That’s intentional.

When I think about AI, I’m not looking for nine companies that all do the same thing.

I’m looking at the ecosystem being built around it.

Nvidia supplies computing power. SK Hynix supplies memory. Teck supplies materials. SpaceX could eventually take some of that infrastructure into orbit.

Then you have companies like Palantir, Dave, Oscar and Meta asking a completely different question:

Now that we have AI, how can we use it to make our existing businesses better?

And sitting alongside all of this is the transformation of the financial system itself.

That’s where Hyperliquid and tokenization come in.

More assets.

More liquidity.

More hours of the day.

More ways for investors around the world to participate.

I’ve been saying for a while that the lines between technology, finance, energy and even space are getting harder to see.

That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point.

The AI buildout needs chips. The chips need memory. The data centers need electricity. The electricity needs copper. Somebody needs to finance all of it. And increasingly, the assets themselves are going to live and trade on entirely new rails.

That’s the world I’m investing in.

Not because every company on this list is going to win.

They won’t.

And I’m certainly not telling you to run out and buy all nine tomorrow morning.

This is a watchlist.

I want to see which companies keep executing, which opportunities get bigger and, most importantly, what price tells us along the way.

Because no matter how exciting AI gets, that part hasn’t changed.

Only price pays.