2 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy Now and Hold for the Long Term

Key Points

• Amazon and Microsoft are leaders in the cloud computing space.

• Amazon is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help drive operating leverage in its e-commerce business.

• Microsoft's decision to quickly embrace AI has led to strong growth.

• These 10 stocks could mint the next wave of millionaires ›

The market is being led higher by megacap tech companies that have shown the ability to grow and adapt. With technology continually shifting, this is the key to long-term success and leadership.

Let's look at two top companies that have not only grown to become the largest in the world today, but also have bright futures, given their ability to adapt and find new opportunities.

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1. Amazon

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) built its e-commerce business by spending years pouring money into warehouses and logistics, and now it is using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to get more out of that network. Its DeepFleet AI model is now coordinating more than 1 million robots across its fulfillment centers, and these robots are doing more than just moving boxes around. Some can spot damaged products before they get shipped, which means fewer returns, and some can even repair themselves.

But the use of AI does not stop there. Amazon is also using AI to figure out which warehouse should hold a product, the best route to get it to a customer, and even where the driver needs to go in a huge apartment complex to drop a package off. This is leading not only to quicker deliveries, but also to lower costs.

Amazon is also using AI to help advertisers better target users with its high-gross margin sponsored ad business. This is resulting in strong operating leverage in its e-commerce business, with its North American operating income surging 47% last quarter on only an 11% increase in revenue.

At the same time, AWS is still a powerful growth engine. It continues to lead the cloud market with nearly 30% share and grew revenue by more than 17% last quarter. Demand is strong because customers are rushing to build AI models and applications, and AWS makes that simple with tools like Bedrock and SageMaker.

The company is also pushing into agentic AI with Strands and AgentCore, which let customers build AI agents and run them safely. Its custom Trainium and Inferentia chips make training and running those models cheaper and faster, which keeps customers on its platform.

Amazon is making a lot of capital expenditures (capex) to build its AI infrastructure, but it has a history of spending big, then reaping the rewards later. With margins expanding in e-commerce and AWS still capacity constrained, the growth story here is far from over, and the stock still looks like a long-term buy.

2. Microsoft

In the past, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) was often viewed as a slow mover, but with AI, it moved quickly, which has proven to be the right move.

The company made a large, early investment in OpenAI, which gave it early access to its GPT models and let it roll out Copilot AI assistants across its Office suite. Those tools are valuable because they can save workers time, and at $30 per user, per month, this can add a lot of growth.

The bigger growth driver, though, is its cloud computing unit Azure. Microsoft's cloud revenue jumped 39% last quarter, and it could have been higher if it hadn't run into capacity constraints. The company is spending heavily to add more graphics processing units (GPUs) and servers, which should allow it to capture even more demand in the quarters ahead. Microsoft is also diversifying its AI stack, adding models from xAI and building its own in-house models, giving customers more flexibility.

What makes Microsoft a compelling stock to own for the next decade is that Azure is the fastest-growing of the big three cloud providers, and it has a chance to eventually challenge AWS for the No. 1 spot in cloud computing. That is where enterprise AI workloads are being run, and Microsoft is quickly becoming one of the top choices for companies that want access to the best models and the infrastructure to run them at scale.

Microsoft has proven it can adapt and act quickly, which is exactly what you want to see from a tech leader.

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Geoffrey Seiler has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Microsoft. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.