Top 10 Stocks I’m Buying to Get Rich in 2026 (Without Getting Lucky)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Accountability
3. Top Stocks for 2026
3.1. AI Models
3.2. AI Chips
3.3. Data Centers
3.4. Digital Infrastructure
4. Conclusion

Introduction

It's almost the new year, so you're probably seeing a ton of articles on the top stocks for 2026, but they're mostly filled with random companies and cherry-picked price charts. This article is a little different. Every stock on my list works together, so I'm holding all the winners in five massive markets that are all growing fast thanks to AI. That's the best way to get rich without getting lucky. Your time is valuable, so let's get right into it.

First things first, accountability is important, especially when it comes to investing. This is my third year making an annual stock list, so let's go over my past performance and you can decide if the rest of this video is worth watching. Here's the list I made in 2024, with each stock's returns for the year and how they did versus the S&P 500, since the whole point is to beat the market.

2024 was a remarkable year, with the S&P 500 returning over 25%; however, the stocks on my list returned 77% on average, which means we more than tripled the S&P 500's returns during one of its most significant runs in recent history. And here's the list I made for 2025. It was another great year for investors, with the S&P 500 returning 18% year-to-date. But the stocks on my list returned 36% on average, which means we're up 140% in just two years. That's what I mean by getting rich without getting lucky.

And of course, I'm not here to hold you hostage, so here's the full list for 2026 and there are timestamps so you can jump around but let me quickly point out a few things before you do first this isn't some all or nothing list of stocks it's the foundation for my portfolio in 2026 and beyond and i'm sharing it for educational purposes only so buy what you believe in and ignore the rest second i won't rehash the same things i always say about these stocks instead i'll show you how they all work together to cover five key ai markets models chips data data center infrastructure, AI native applications, and enterprise software.

Because owning all the top players in these high growth markets is a great way to get rich without worrying about which company comes out on top. That said, I'm not a financial advisor. My background is in electrical engineering and data science, and I have over 10 years of industry experience using AI to solve real world problems. I only invest for the long term, and I stay inside my circle of competence, which is why every stock I cover focuses on AI and the chips that power it.

And finally, there's a ton to talk about, so this video will stay pretty high level. My whole channel focuses on the science behind these stocks, so if there's a company you want to learn more about, you can probably find a video where I cover it in way more detail. Alright, now that you have all that context, let's dive into my top stocks for 2026. Every year, I say the same thing. Beating the market is simple.

It's not easy, but it is simple, since all I have to do is hold the NASDAQ 100, ticker symbol QQQ. The Triple Qs is an index fund focused on tech companies, which tend to outperform over the long term. And right now, it's finishing the year up 22% versus the S&P 500's 18%, which works out to about 20% more returns over 2025. But the NASDAQ also holds companies that don't fit the AI-focused portfolio that I'm looking for, holding stocks like Costco, T-Mobile, and Pepsi.

So in 2025, I found a fund that lets me have my cake and eat it too. Vanguard's Information Technology ETF, ticker symbol VGT. VGT holds 322 companies, which is right between the Nasdaq's 100 and the S&P's 500 in terms of diversification. The big difference is that it only holds companies focused on semiconductors, hardware, system software, and applications, all of which are benefiting from generative AI while skipping the Costcos and Pepsis altogether.

On top of that, VGT's top 10 holdings make up 60% of the fund by weight, and it includes companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Broadcom, Palantir, AMD, and Micron, all of which are key players in many of the massive, high-growth AI markets I'm about to show you.

And finally, VGT has lower fees than SPY or the Triple Qs, so I'm not just outperforming them, I also paying less to do so which helps my returns compound even faster And if your brokerage doesn offer VGT then the NASDAQ 100 is still a great way to beat the S 500 year after year after year But while funds like VGT and the Triple Qs make a great foundation for any long-term portfolio, the real returns come from companies dominating different parts of the AI era.

AI Models

NVIDIA, Google, and Meta Platforms have check marks on my table because they already have huge ecosystems built around their own AI models. NVIDIA has Nemotron, which is a family of reasoning and agentic AI models they released with full data, tools, and open weights.

Meta has Llama, which is one of the most widely adopted open-source LLMs on Earth, not just across Meta's apps, which billions of people use every single day, but also by companies that are building their own apps, their own co-pilots, and their own internal tools. And, of course, Google has Gemini, which they integrated into Google Search, Workspace, Cloud, Gmail, and YouTube, giving it unparalleled access to different revenue-generating workflows, human feedback, and usage data.

And speaking of data, you probably know that VPNs protect you and your data by encrypting it and changing your digital location. But did you know that VPNs can also save you some serious money? That's where Surfshark comes in, the sponsor of this video. So Surfshark is a super fast and easy to use VPN that you can install on unlimited devices with just one account to protect yourself and your entire family.

They also have add-ons like Surfshark Alert, which alerts you if your email, credit cards, or personal information get leaked in a data breach. Talk about a total lifesaver. Also many online stores raise their prices based on your digital location. But with Surfshark you can always get the best price on expensive purchases like plane tickets, hotel rooms, and rental cars.

So, if you care about your family's privacy and you like saving money, you can go to surfshark.com slash ticker to get up to 4 extra months for free. And with Surfshark's 30-day money-back guarantee, there's no risk in trying it with my link in the description below today.

Alright, so while many frontier model makers are still private, like OpenAI, XAI, and Anthropic, owning Nvidia, Google, and Metastock means investing in some of the most powerful and widely used AI models already making money today. All three of these tech giants also have global distribution, through smartphones and GPUs, apps and social networks, and consumer and cloud services.

And maybe most importantly, AI model makers also decide the future for AI chips, which are designed and optimized for the most used AI architectures. And that brings me to the companies designing and building those chips, which are the picks and shovels of this AI gold rush. Investing in NVIDIA, Google, Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor and Micron means owning a huge chunk of AI's hardware stack, from the GPUs and TPUs to the memory and networking chips.

That's what I mean when I say the stocks on my list work together. NVIDIA has a whopping 92% share of the data center GPU market, with their Hopper and Blackwell chips powering most AI model training and quite a bit of inference. They also just announced their $20 billion acquisition of Grok's assets. Grok is a 9-year-old chip company founded by the creators of Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which directly compete with NVIDIA to power high-volume inference workloads.

For example, the ranking and recommender systems used by services like Google Search, Amazon.com, and Netflix.

This is NVIDIA's biggest deal ever by far, and I expect it to have huge returns for shareholders over time, just like NVIDIA's $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox back in 2019, which added things like Quantum InfiniBand, the Bluefield DPUs, and Spectrum X Ethernet switches to NVIDIA hardware portfolio I cover NVIDIA Aqua hiring of Grok leadership team in way more detail in a future video so stay tuned for that And of course Google TPUs are the custom accelerators powering Gemini as well as external workloads through Google Cloud and Vertex AI.

Google also recently announced that they're considering selling their TPUs to external companies like Meta Platforms, which means they're actively trying to capture market share from Nvidia‘s GPUs. So, holding them both is a great way to get rich off AI accelerators without getting lucky. On top of that, Broadcom is the undisputed king of custom chips, designing them for Google, Meta, OpenAI, and even Anthropic.

They also dominate the Ethernet switch chip market, with over 99% of all internet traffic touching at least one Broadcom chip. That's important because most data centers are Ethernet-based today, so they're probably already using Broadcom's hardware, which gives them a serious advantage over any less established companies that are trying to disrupt them.

And speaking of companies that will never be disrupted, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, ticker symbol TSM, is the world's largest chip manufacturer by a massive margin.

TSMC has over a 70% share of the chip foundry market, and around a 90% share for advanced nodes, which means they already make almost every advanced processor on earth and their dominance is only growing over time tsmc makes chips for nvidia amd apple google broadcom microsoft amazon and many more of the world's biggest companies so if anything happens to them the world will have much bigger problems than the price of tsm stock and micron makes the memory for ai specifically they're the only us company with a serious share of the high bandwidth memory market their hbm chips can be found in nvidia's hopper h200s and Blackwell B200 GPUs, as well as AMD's Instinct MI350 accelerators.

And as long as AI models keep getting bigger and more widely deployed, demand for compute, networking, memory, and manufacturing capacity will all keep growing. All of these companies also have deep moats, since designing and manufacturing cutting-edge chips takes massive amounts of upfront capital, intellectual property, and supply chain relationships which make it hard for competitors to eat into their margins.

That's why Nvidia, Google, Broadcom, TSMC, and Micron make money when almost any other company trains or serves AI models, making them a great set of stocks to get rich without getting lucky. But AI chips are only as good as the infrastructure that supports them, which is why my top stocks for data centers are Nvidia, Google, Vertiv Holdings, and iREN. I've already talked about Nvidia and Google a lot, so let me spend more time on the rest of this list.

Vertiv Holdings, ticker symbol VRT, sells power and cooling infrastructure that makes AI data centers actually work at scale. Specifically, their liquid cooling systems target high-density server deployments and massive GPU clusters for AI training and inference. But the real reason Vertivit is on my list again is because their flagship cooling systems can be scaled up to 600 kilowatts per unit, which is just enough to liquid cool five 120-kilowatt NVIDIA Blackwell racks at a time.

and it's designed to bolt onto many existing data center setups with minimal infrastructure changes. That's why its cooling, power, and rack systems are being designed directly into AI-optimized buildouts and NVIDIA's AI-factory-style deployments. Likewise, iREN is building AI-first data centers and renting out tens of thousands of bare-metal NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, instead of trying to fight the hyperscalers as a full cloud platform.

Instead, they're partnering with them, which is a very smart move. But the reason they're on my list is simple. iREN controls roughly 3 gigawatts of secured, grid-connected power across Canada and Texas, with massive campuses planned for up to 2 gigawatts of liquid-cooled Blackwell-class deployments over time. That works out to over 300,000 Blackwell GPUs worth of capacity.

This combination of cheap renewable power, owner-operated facilities, and long-term partnerships with NVIDIA and Microsoft make iREN one of the cleanest ways to own the power and physical infrastructure behind the next wave of AI data center build outs But just like the core of the AI revolution includes physical AI chips and digital AI models we need physical infrastructure and digital infrastructure to add AI to existing apps services and software platforms as well as create brand new ones that's where Palantir and CrowdStrike come in both of which were also on my list in 2025 and if you feel I've earned it so far consider hitting the like button and subscribing to the channel that really helps me out and you'll first to know when I publish new updates on these stocks.

Anyway, Palantir is quickly becoming the AI operating system for enterprises and governments through Gotham, Foundry, and their Artificial Intelligence Platform, or AIP. These platforms act as digital AI infrastructure by integrating fragmented data, presenting it as an ontology, and letting customers plug in large language models and decision logic directly into their real-world workflows, from manufacturing and logistics, to finance and defense.

I cover Palantir pretty often because I think it's the best way to own the application layer of AI infrastructure. If companies want AI co-pilots they can trust to make important decisions and take automated actions, Palantir's platforms are how they need to do it. On the other hand, CrowdStrike is the security backbone for those same AI enterprises.

Its Falcon platform collects and correlates trillions of security events every day across endpoints user and machine identities cloud workloads and data storage devices then they layer on generative ai tools like charlotte ai and falcon ai detection and response which help automate investigations and block cyber threats in real time that means crowdstrike is one of the few vendors that stands to benefit as generative ai tools and agents create new cyber threats for corporate assets and employees making them a big winner as ai adoption continues to accelerate and Now we've come full circle, since the biggest competitors for companies like Palantir and CrowdStrike are going to be Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, which all have their own software stacks including data analysis tools, AI pipelines, and cybersecurity services.

Google is already on our list, and Microsoft makes up over 12% of VGT. So I win no matter which company comes out on top. No luck needed. And since generative AI is constantly coming out with new breakthroughs, use cases, apps, and even devices. Every company on this list will need to keep up with the state-of-the-art or get disrupted by new companies that will. The market tends to reward companies that are fast and flexible, which is why that's the last column on my list. This isn't for fluff.

Think about how Google decided to go for NVIDIA's inference market share by selling their own TPUs, or how NVIDIA just aqua-hired Grok's leadership team to defend it. Think about how Meta is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bake AI into all of their apps and services and open source models so closed models can't disrupt them. Or how Micron pivoted away from consumer PCs and put all their resources into making more high bandwidth memory for data centers.

Every single one of these companies has proven that they're willing to do what it takes to win. I know this video is a little long, but I wanted to be thorough since the whole idea is to build a solid foundation for 2026. To me, that means focusing on the fastest growing markets and holding the winners by understanding the science behind the stocks. That's the best way to get rich without getting lucky. So, one more time, here's my list from 2024 and how it performed over the year.

My top 10 stocks to get rich without getting lucky in 2026. Thanks for watching to the end even though I gave you everything up front. And until next time, this is Ticker Symbol U. My name is Alex reminding you that the best investment you can make is in you, and I'm excited to share more insights with you from TickerSymbol: YOU.

Key Takeaways

• Investing in AI-focused stocks can be a great way to get rich without getting lucky.
• The global artificial intelligence market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 38.5% through 2034.
• NVIDIA, Google, and Meta Platforms are key players in the AI model market.
• Investing in companies that design and build AI chips, such as NVIDIA, Google, Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Micron, can provide a huge chunk of AI's hardware stack.
• Vertiv Holdings and iREN are great options for investing in data center infrastructure.
• Palantir and CrowdStrike are leading the way in digital AI infrastructure.
• It's essential to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the AI industry to make informed investment decisions.