The stock market has gotten off to a rocky start this year, but market volatility is a small price to pay for the large gains of holding shares of a great business over many years. If you put your money in the right growth stocks, you can build wealth that lasts for generations. Consider that Coca-Cola has been around since 1886, yet its stock is still hitting new highs in 2025.
If you have $2,000 extra cash you don't need for other life priorities, putting that cash to work in shares of leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies could be very rewarding over the next decade and beyond. The following AI stocks would make solid additions to a well-rounded portfolio of growth investments.
1. ServiceNow
Companies are in the process of investing substantial sums in AI. ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) is a leader provider of AI software that helps businesses streamline workflows and increase operating efficiency. It is used by leading companies, including the U.S. government, and it continues to see strong demand. The company just announced another quarter of strong growth that has the stock moving higher.
ServiceNow's subscription revenue grew 19% year-over-year in Q1, exceeding expectations. Wall Street was fearful that uncertainty in the economy would weigh on near-term investment in software, but ServiceNow's momentum isn't slowing. It closed 72 deals over $1 million in net new annual contract value.
It is positioning to be a leader in agentic AI. AI agents are super-intelligent assistants that can take a request by the user and complete a series of tasks to solve a problem. Demand for advanced AI features drove a 150% year-over-year increase in the number of deals for ServiceNow's Pro Plus AI offerings last quarter.
ServiceNow also seems well positioned to benefit from potential new deals in its federal government business, where it has more than 1,700 federal and public sector customers. The Trump administration's goal to increase government efficiency certainly plays to ServiceNow's capabilities. Its U.S. public sector revenue grew over 30% year-over-year in Q1, including one new customer in the federal government.
What's clear is that ServiceNow is emerging as a go-to solution for leading organizations wanting to use AI to improve productivity and modernize operations. The need to reduce costs and improve efficiency is becoming more urgent than ever. As each company adopts AI solutions, it leads to a domino effect where other companies are basically forced to adopt similar solutions to stay competitive. This is fueling ServiceNow's momentum.
The stock popped 23% following its Q1 earnings results, but it's still trading more than 30% from its recent highs. Investors could split their $2,000 and buy one share of ServiceNow. Analysts are projecting the company's earnings to grow at an annualized rate of 30%, which could fuel handsome gains for investors over the next several years.
2. Nvidia
The demand for AI software also fuels growth for leading suppliers of advanced computing chips. Training applications to solve problems without human input requires substantial investment in graphics processing units (GPUs) for AI training, and Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs are the gold standard.
Nvidia has been the leader in GPUs for many years. As the leading supplier of very pricey chips, it is a highly profitable business, with $73 billion in trailing-12-month net income. It has growing resources to invest in innovation to remain the leader for years to come.
Nvidia's chips were the popular choice the past few years that helped train the AI for OpenAI's ChatGPT and other popular AI models. Cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are some of Nvidia's top customers. Nvidia's new Blackwell chips are in high demand, with analysts expecting the company's revenue to increase 55% to $201 billion this year.
Annual spending on data center infrastructure, which is Nvidia's largest addressable market, is expected to reach $1 trillion in the coming years, according to Dell'Oro Group. But CEO Jensen Huang believes that the market for GPU-based computing systems could be hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. That's based on the idea that every company and industry will one day run on AI.
Analysts expect Nvidia's earnings to grow more than 35% per year over the next several years. Yet investors can currently buy the shares for 22 times this year's consensus earnings estimate. That's modest for a company growing at these rates.
Investors who split their money between ServiceNow and Nvidia will own shares of two dominant AI companies on the software and hardware side and will be in a great position to profit from the growth of AI.
Should you invest $1,000 in ServiceNow right now?
Before you buy stock in ServiceNow, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and ServiceNow wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $594,046!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $680,390!*
Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 872% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 160% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of April 21, 2025
Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Ballard has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and ServiceNow. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
