Got $3,000? 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Long Term

John Ballard, The Motley Fool

Sat, May 10, 2025, 6:15 PM 5 min read

• Nvidia provides AI computing solutions across several leading industries, helping it rake in billions of profits.

• Microsoft is seeing incredibly strong demand for AI services in its cloud business.

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The technology sector has produced some of the biggest winners in the stock market in recent decades, and artificial intelligence (AI) promises big rewards for investors who hold the right stocks.

If you have $3,000 to invest right now, the following companies are competitively positioned to deliver excellent returns over the long term, as they already have over the past decade. Splitting your cash equally in these stocks will cover your bases across the hardware and software side of the AI market.

The computing horsepower of graphics processing units (GPUs) is essential for training computer models to think and respond to human inquiries in natural language. Nvidia's (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs are the gold standard. The company is experiencing explosive demand that makes the stock's recent dip a great buying opportunity.

Nvidia's data center revenue more than doubled last year, and now comprises almost 90% of its business. Investors are counting on the company's new Blackwell computing system to drive an estimated 54% revenue increase for the current fiscal year.

Blackwell was designed to bring significant performance improvements over the previous Hopper generation of chips for AI tasks. AI models from OpenAI, xAI, and others are getting increasingly sophisticated in their ability to solve complicated problems and logically converse with a human on a number of topics. The computational power to improve the next generation of AI models will be up to 100 times more per task, which should benefit Nvidia.

Some of Nvidia's customers, including OpenAI, are investing in their own custom AI chips, which poses a risk. This is one reason why Nvidia stock has fallen year to date, but these concerns are likely overblown.

Nvidia isn't just selling chips to model makers for specific workloads. Its GPUs can be used for a wide variety of computing purposes. For example, the Mayo Clinic is building a state-of-the-art digital pathology lab to speed up the diagnosis and treatments in healthcare using Nvidia's DGX computing platform.

Nvidia offers solutions like this for several industries, which is a competitive advantage. This advantage can be seen by its stellar profit margin. Last year, Nvidia earned $73 billion in net income on $130 billion of revenue.