2 AI Stocks With Sky-High Potential to Hold for Decades

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These two “pick-and-shovel” AI stocks offer attractive growth prospects.

There is a massive investment cycle underway in artificial intelligence (AI). Morgan Stanley estimates that spending on AI infrastructure could exceed $3 trillion in the next three years.

The companies providing the chips and data centers to enable the AI transformation of the economy could be very rewarding investments for potentially decades to come.

Here are two top AI infrastructure stocks to consider buying right now.

Image source: Nvidia.

1. Nvidia

Cloud services, enterprises, and governments are desperate to get their hands on as many graphics processing units (GPUs) as they can. These chips are essential for the most advanced AI training and inferencing workloads, and Nvidia (NVDA -0.10%) has controlled as much as 90% of this market.

Investors may be hesitant to buy Nvidia stock after its monstrous run, climbing 31,000% over the last 10 years, but it’s the most valuable company in the world for a reason. AI companies have deployed thousands of Nvidia GPUs to train AI, but that number is going to keep growing as these companies chase the achievement of super-human intelligent AI capabilities, which will require substantially larger clusters of chips potentially numbering in the millions.

For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that it will exceed 1 million GPUs deployed by the end of 2025. The two companies have collaborated to optimize OpenAI’s open-source GPT-oss models on Nvidia chips. Altman added that OpenAI will have to figure out how to “100x” that amount, or utilize 100 million GPUs. This underscores the long-term opportunity for Nvidia.

Competition among cloud companies and AI researchers is driving Nvidia’s growth. Nvidia’s data center business continues to grow at insanely high rates for a company of this size. Sales to data centers made up 88% of Nvidia’s revenue last quarter and grew 56% year over year.

Because Nvidia enjoys such a dominant position in the GPU market, it is raking in enormous profits, which fuels more innovation. It offers several computing platforms for different markets, such as Jetson for training robots and Nvidia IGX for industrial and medical edge AI applications.

It’s amazing that Nvidia stock can still be bought for just 28 times next year’s earnings estimate. This is a bargain for a company analysts expect to grow earnings at an annualized rate of 36% in the coming years.

Image source: Getty Images.

2. Iren Limited

Investing in the companies building and operating the data centers is a great way to profit off the AI boom. Investors have a solid option in Iren Limited (Iris Energy) (IREN 9.36%). The company is shifting its focus from Bitcoin mining to building high-performance data centers for AI, which could spell significant return potential for long-term investors.

Buying shares of Iren is almost like getting in early on Standard Oil over a century ago before it eventually became ExxonMobil. Data centers are like the new oil producers of the 21st century, except it could be even more lucrative.

Iren’s revenue more than doubled last year to $501 million, while adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) grew 395% to $270 million. Wall Street analysts project Iren’s adjusted EBITDA to reach $1.2 billion in the next three years.

It requires tremendous amounts of power to run thousands of GPUs simultaneously in data centers. This is ultimately the need that Iren is addressing, where power shortages could become a major bottleneck in the AI market. Goldman Sachs projects that data centers will need 165% more power by the end of the decade, but it’s uncertain whether there will be enough power capacity to meet it.

This could be a huge windfall for Iren. It has secured 2.9 gigawatts of contracted power for its data centers and has already increased its power capacity by roughly 100-fold over the last four years. Companies needing more AI infrastructure will be lining up to use every bit of capacity Iren can supply, which could send its revenue soaring.

The stock has soared 240% year to date, as investors catch on to the opportunity here. Iren is facing a tsunami wave of demand in the coming years, and the company is just starting to experience the early part of that growth curve.

John Ballard has positions in Bitcoin, Iren, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Goldman Sachs Group, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.