If You Can Only Buy 1 AI Stock for the Rest of 2026, Make It This One

1 hour ago 3

Harsh Chauhan, The Motley Fool

Tue, May 19, 2026 astatine 11:05 AM CDT 5 min read

Artificial quality (AI) stocks person regained their mojo aft a tepid commencement to 2026. The Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF, an exchange-traded money that invests successful companies utilizing AI successful their operations and selling related hardware and bundle solutions, has appreciated by 19% truthful acold this year.

It is worthy noting that the ETF has jumped by 28% since the opening of April, outpacing the S&P 500's 12% summation implicit the aforesaid period. It is casual to spot wherefore AI stocks are rallying erstwhile again. Major hyperscalers and AI companies proceed to put heavy successful AI information centers to conscionable the booming request for AI bundle solutions.

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Companies specified arsenic Palantir Technologies and Anthropic are witnessing singular request for their bundle solutions that assistance customers unlock large productivity gains. So, it is casual to spot wherefore determination are nary signs of a slowdown successful AI information halfway investments. The bully portion is that the immense backlogs of AI bundle providers and the shortage of captious components should guarantee that companies proceed to put billions of dollars to conscionable the dense compute demand.

As a result, buying shares of Lam Research (NASDAQ: LRCX) could crook retired to beryllium 1 of the smartest moves successful 2026. Let's look astatine the reasons wherefore this semiconductor banal whitethorn beryllium the lone 1 you request to put successful to capitalize connected the AI supercycle.

Person pressing a bluish  fastener  marked arsenic  "buy" connected  a keyboard.

Image source: Getty Images.

Lam Research is 1 of the champion ways to capitalize connected AI's maturation

The increasing request for AI compute explains the dense request for assorted types of chips, including graphics processing units (GPUs), server processors, customized AI processors, and memory. Companies designing and manufacturing these chips are expecting terrific income growth.

Broadcom, for instance, is expecting a 5x summation successful its AI spot gross successful conscionable 2 years. Nvidia estimates it tin merchantability a whopping $1 trillion worthy of information halfway AI chips successful 2026 and 2027. Meanwhile, representation manufacturers are scrambling to summation proviso to code the immense shortage of representation chips.

All this explains wherefore determination is terrific request for wafer and fabrication instrumentality (WFE) that's needed to manufacture chips. This is large quality for Lam Research, which designs and manufactures semiconductor manufacturing instrumentality for chipmakers, foundries, and representation companies. The institution precocious accrued its 2026 WFE spending forecast to $140 cardinal from an earlier estimation of $135 billion.

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