3 No-Brainer AI Stocks to Buy Right Now

The U.S. equity market is showing small signs of volatility of late, as mixed signals regarding the economy, have investor sentiment see-sawing. One recent bit of news noted that U.S.-based employers cut over 150,000 jobs in October 2025 (the largest monthly reduction in the past two decades). The uncertain employment picture right now has the market concerned about a broader economic slowdown in the coming months.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite index gave up some of its gains from last month on the news, but is still up nearly 22% so far in 2025. Investors are worried that slowing employment growth may negatively impact consumer spending and, eventually, corporate earnings.

In this environment, it makes sense for retail investors to pick stakes only in financially sound market leaders that are investing in clearly growing sectors of the economy. One such sector is artificial intelligence (AI)-powered hardware, software, and data centers. While stocks in this sector are just as susceptible to broad market movements and may stutter in the short term, their robust fundamentals will drive share prices up in the long run.

Three specific no-brainer AI stocks fit the bill. Here's why.

Image source: Getty Images.

1. Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) is quickly becoming a crucial chip supplier supporting the global buildout of AI infrastructure. The company recently entered into a multiyear deal with OpenAI to supply 6 gigawatts of data center capacity powered with its next-generation Instinct MI450 graphics processing units (GPUs), with the first 1 gigawatt capacity set to come online in the second half of 2026.

The deal validates the strength of AMD's Instinct GPUs and ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) open software stack to handle complex and demanding AI workloads while balancing performance and total cost of ownership. The company also expects this deal to significantly accelerate its data center AI business, enabling it to generate over $100 billion in annual revenue in the next few years.

Oracle has already announced plans to deploy tens of thousands of MI450 GPUs, starting with the initial deployment of 50,000 GPUs in the third quarter of calendar 2026 and continuing into 2027 and beyond. This will dramatically expand AMD's footprint in the data center market. The company's Instinct GPUs are also in high demand in sovereign AI projects and are increasingly used by large enterprises such as Cisco Systems and International Business Machines. The company is thus expected to see a significant rise in high-margin AI accelerator revenue.

AMD's performance in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was also impressive, with revenue soaring 36% year over year to $9.2 billion and net income jumping 43% year over year to $1.2 billion. The growth was driven primarily by solid demand for its Instinct MI350 AI chips and EPYC server processors from major hyperscalers and its Ryzen processors in PCs and gaming units.

With Instinct MI450 accelerators and Helios rack-scale systems (integrating Instinct GPUs, EPYC central processing units (CPUs), and Pensando networking into a data center-optimized system) expected to launch in 2026, AMD can see even faster improvement in top- and bottom-line performance in the coming quarters.

Microsoft

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is investing heavily to remain ahead in the AI race, and those investments are already paying off. The company has increased its AI data center capacity by 80% in 2025 and expects to double its data center footprint in the next two years. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, the company's capex reached $34.9 billion, with half of the spend attributed to AI infrastructure and software development.

The heavy AI spending is already translating into solid financial performance. In the first quarter, Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud revenue was up 26% year over year to $49.1 billion, driven by 40% year-over-year revenue growth of the Azure cloud platform. With demand for AI workloads soaring, the company exited the first quarter with commercial remaining performance obligations of $392 billion, up 51% on a year-over-year basis. This includes OpenAI's recent deal to purchase an additional $250 billion of Azure services.

Microsoft has further expanded its data center footprint by signing a $9.7 billion five-year deal with data center operator IREN to expand capacity without building new data centers or securing additional power. The deal gives Microsoft access to Nvidia's latest Blackwell architecture GB300 GPUs from 2026 to 2031. The company has also collaborated with Abu Dhabi's G42 to expand data center capacity by 200 megawatts as a part of its $15 billion investment plans in the United Arab Emirates.

Beyond AI infrastructure, Microsoft Copilot services (integrated in its applications) are used by over 150 million monthly active users.

Hence, considering the rapid expansion of AI-optimized data center capacity and the rising adoption of Copilot's agentic capabilities across the product ecosystem, Microsoft seems a worthwhile pick now.

Meta Platforms

Social media and digital advertising giant Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) reported impressive performance in the third quarter of fiscal 2025, with revenue up 26% year over year to $51.2 billion. Of this, the Family of Apps digital advertising business contributed $50.8 billion in revenue, driven by a healthy mix of 14% more ad impressions and 10% higher pricing per advertisement. The company also reported a solid operating margin of 40%, despite increased compensation for AI talent and other technical talent in key areas.

Meta benefits from its massive scale, with 3.5 billion people using one of its applications daily. The company's AI tools help improve user engagement and monetization. In fact, the company's end-to-end AI tools (automation tools) are delivering revenue with an annual run rate of over $60 billion. Meta is also aggressively advancing its consumer AI offerings.

Currently, over 1 billion people use its virtual AI assistant Meta AI monthly. The company's AI glasses are also seeing robust demand. These products further add new advertising and commerce opportunities for Meta.

Additionally, Meta has been investing aggressively in servers, data centers, and networking to build compute capacity for training and inferencing large AI models. This will help further improve content discovery, ad recommendations, and ad targeting on its platforms.

The company highlighted the increasing regulatory scrutiny in the European Union as a significant challenge. Yet, with its focus on advancing AI-powered ad offerings and building Meta Superintelligence Labs to develop and launch next-generation AI-powered offerings, the stock appears well-positioned to grow higher in the coming months.

Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, International Business Machines, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. 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.