10 Generative AI Stocks to Watch as ChatGPT Soars

The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT created a major buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) stocks.

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot software application that uses machine-learning techniques to emulate human-written conversations. This technology is called generative AI, and it's been making an impact on myriad industries, including marketing, security, healthcare, gaming, communication, customer service and software development.

The potential behind generative AI has been the primary driver behind a major stock rally that has helped the S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX) and Nasdaq Composite (INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC) reach multiple new highs since 2023.

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According to Fortune Business Insights, the global generative AI market size was estimated at US$103.58 billion in 2025 and projected to grow from US$161 billion in 2026 to US$1.26 trillion by 2034.

Although investors can’t currently invest in OpenAI stock directly, several technology stocks offer exposure to the generative AI market, including some of the biggest names in tech.

Below, the Investing News Network showcases 10 generative AI stocks that stand to benefit the most from the rise in advancements and adoption of AI chatbot technologies, separated into software and hardware offerings.

Data was gathered using TradingView’s stock screener. All market cap and share price data was current as of August 31, 2026.

Biggest software AI stocks to watch

These five tech giants offer investors exposure to generative AI by offering their own chatbots and generative AI products, developing the software necessary for AI and integrating AI into their products.

1. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Market cap: US$4.13 trillion
Current share price: US$339.35

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has played a key role in advancing generative AI. Its flagship AI model, Gemini, powers a wide range of services, with new versions continuously being rolled out. The company designs its own custom AI accelerator chips, which are used to train large-scale language models and power its AI services.

Alphabet's subsidiary, DeepMind, focuses on AI research and development. Its AI system AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for its ability to predict the structure of proteins based on a protein's unique amino acid sequence.

AI continues to be embedded across Google's services and products, with Gemini serving as the default assistant for the company's lineup of Pixel smartphones, and AI Overviews being delivered on many Google searches.

2. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Market cap: US$3.77 trillion
Current share price: US$507.29

The technology behemoth Microsoft has invested US$13 billion in OpenAI throughout the years, and the company's current AI solutions, Bing AI and Copilot, are based on OpenAI's technology.

In late October 2025, Microsoft and OpenAI signed a new agreement, with Microsoft's stake now described as an investment in "OpenAI Group PBC" valued at approximately US$135 billion. OpenAI remains Microsoft's frontier-model partner, and Microsoft keeps exclusive IP rights and Azure API exclusivity.

Microsoft has also partnered with Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR) to provide AI tools to US defense and intelligence agencies.

More recently, Microsoft's AI branch, dubbed MAI, has branched out. At Microsoft Build 2026, the MAI team introduced a reasoning model, a lightweight coding model, updated image and voice models and a transcription model that Microsoft is billing as best-in-class in terms of word error rate.

As of the company's Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings, released in July, Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats.

3. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Market cap: US$2.8 trillion
Current share price: US$259.77

Amazon subsidiary and cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) evolved out of Amazon’s transition from an online retailer to one of the world’s largest technology companies. AWS’s wide range of services includes computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and AI.

AWS has many AI business tools on offer across four verticals: AI services, AI platforms, AI frameworks and AI infrastructure. In 2025, the company relaunched its voice assistant as Alexa+, a generative, model-agnostic version of Alexa that handles multi-turn conversations and completes tasks like bookings and trip planning, rather than just discrete commands. Alexa+ became free to all US Prime members nationwide in February 2026.

Since its launch in 2023, Bedrock, a service that lets businesses build with generative AI foundation models, has expanded its catalog to include OpenAI's open-weight models and Anthropic's latest Claude models. At its 2025 AWS Summit in New York, the company unveiled Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to help businesses deploy and scale AI agents with enterprise-grade security and tool integration. AgentCore reached general availability that October and has kept expanding since, with new managed components added through mid-2026.

4. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)

Market cap: US$1.46 trillion
Current share price: US$572.34

Meta Platforms has expressed its commitment to continued research within the generative AI sphere with an open-source approach to its software developments. The giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is one of the most influential companies in tech, sharing ranks with the likes of Microsoft and Alphabet.

Meta AI is now built on Muse Spark, a new model line from Meta Superintelligence Labs that replaced Meta Llama 3 as the engine behind Meta's AI assistant in April 2026. Meta AI is integrated across Meta's apps as well as a standalone app and website. The company says AI-driven improvements to its ad-ranking model lifted Facebook ad clicks, a strategy that has helped keep Meta's ad business as its primary driver of revenue.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has maintained that increased spending on AI infrastructure is necessary to maintain the company's competitive position. Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance twice this year, to a current range of US$130 billion to US$145 billion, nearly double the US$72.2 billion it spent in 2025.

The company has also aggressively pursued AI talent, hiring Scale AI's Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer alongside a roughly US$14 billion investment in Scale AI, and recruiting more than 50 researchers from rivals including OpenAI and Google.

5. Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ:PLTR)

Market cap: US$447.89 billion
Current share price: US$186.38

Palantir Technologies' generative AI strategy is centered on its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), a product designed to help governments and commercial enterprises integrate AI into their operations with a focus on security and human-in-the-loop control.

Rather than building models for general use, Palantir provides a platform that enables customers to leverage large language models from multiple providers, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and xAI, within their own private networks.

That approach has translated into rapid growth: In its Q2 2026 quarter, Palantir reported revenue up 93 percent year-over-year, driven by 149 percent growth in its US commercial business, and the company raised its full-year revenue guidance accordingly.

On the government side, AIP underpins a 10 year enterprise agreement worth up to US$10 billion with the US Army, as well as the Pentagon's Maven Smart System, which processes drone and surveillance data.

Biggest hardware AI stocks to watch

Generative AI's explosive growth is driving the market for chips. These five companies offer investors exposure to generative AI by developing the hardware necessary for the AI buildout.

1. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Market cap: US$5.32 trillion
Current share price: US$220.78

NVIDIA is a pioneer and global leader in graphics processing unit (GPU) technology. The company designs the specialized chips used to train AI and machine-learning models.

While it has been well known in computer and gaming spaces for decades, NVIDIA's progress in the AI sector has been the biggest growth driver in recent years. The company currently holds the title of the world’s most valuable company, coming in ahead of rivals Microsoft, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Alphabet. NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra (GB300) systems, which began shipping in late 2025, are now deployed at scale.

The company's newest architecture is Rubin, a six-chip platform built around the new Vera CPU and Rubin GPU. It was unveiled in January 2026. NVIDIA said that, compared to Blackwell, Rubin cuts AI inference token costs by up to 10 times and needs up to four times fewer GPUs to train mixture-of-experts models.

The platform is in production, and as of September is already deployed with cloud partners including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) Cloud and CoreWeave (NASDAQ:CRWV). Rubin Ultra is the next step, slated for 2027.

2. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE:TSM)

Market cap: US$1.98 trillion
Current share price: US$415.32

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the world's largest contract chipmaker. The company's customer base includes NVIDIA, AMD, Apple and Broadcom.

TSMC has repeatedly accelerated and enlarged its Arizona fab, and total committed US investment now stands at US$265 billion. Chairman C.C. Wei said the second Arizona fab will begin mass production in the second half of 2027, moved up from an original 2028 target.

High-performance computing, which includes AI accelerators, made up 66 percent of Q2 2026 revenue, and net income rose 77 percent year-over-year to roughly US$22.34 billion. TSMC expects full-year revenue growth above 40 percent in 2026, and guidance for Q3 predicts revenue to be between US$44.6 billion and US$45.8 billion. Additionally, TSMC raised its 2026 capex guidance for the second time, to a range of US$60 billion to US$64 billion.

3. Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO)

Market cap: US$1.76 trillion
Current share price: US$370.34

Broadcom's core business spans semiconductors and enterprise software, but its fastest-growing segment is custom AI accelerator chips it co-designs for hyperscalers, among them Google's TPUs, as well as AI networking hardware.

In October 2025, it signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to co-develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of OpenAI-designed accelerators through 2029.

Broadcom's revenue totaled US22.2 billion in the second quarter of its fiscal 2026, a 48 percent year-over-year rise, and its AI semiconductor revenue hit US$10.8 billion, up 143 percent. The company predicted that AI revenue would grow 200 percent on an annual basis to US$16 billion in Q3.

4. Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU)

Market cap: US$1.08 trillion
Current share price: US$958.73

Micron makes the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used to feed data to AI accelerators. The company's market cap passed US$1 trillion earlier this year.

Fiscal Q3 2026 revenue hit a record US$41.5 billion, up 346 percent year-over-year, with its two data-center-focused units accounting for roughly US$25.3 billion of that. Micron says HBM4 is shipping in high volume to its "lead customer," widely reported as Nvidia. Several outlets describe its HBM capacity as sold out through 2026.

5. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD)

Market cap: US$768.44 billion
Current share price: US$470.72

As Nvidia's main competitor in AI accelerators, AMD sells Instinct-series GPUs alongside its EPYC server chips.

In October 2025, AMD signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs, starting with a 1 gigawatt deployment of the new MI450 series in the second half of 2026. As part of the deal, AMD issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million AMD shares, vesting in tranches tied to deployment milestones and AMD's share price. AMD's CFO said the arrangement is expected to generate "tens of billions of dollars" in revenue.

The following February, AMD struck a nearly identical structure with Meta that starts in H2 2026.

In AMD's Q2 2026, data center revenue more than doubled to US$6.7 billion, up 107 percent year-over-year. It made up 58 percent of total revenue, which grew 50 percent to US$11.5 billion. As for net income, the company reported US$2.3 billion during the quarter.

AMD shared Q3 2026 revenue guidance of roughly US$13 billion and said it expects data center sales to keep accelerating through the second half of the year.

FAQs for generative AI

​What is generative AI?

Generative AI is an emerging AI technology based on deep learning models and algorithms that can generate text, images or sounds in response to prompts given by users.

​What are generative AI examples?

Some of the most notable examples of generative AI are ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Gemini, Copilot and DeepSeek.

OpenAI's DALL-E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Similar to DALL-E 2, Midjourney generates images from prompts. Stable Diffusion is a latent text-to-image diffusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input. Microsoft's Copilot is a feature of the Bing search engine that leverages the same technology as ChatGPT.

​What are the hottest generative AI startups?

According to technology and business magazine e-Week, in addition to ChatGPT creator OpenAI, some of the other leading generative AI startups include Hugging Face, Synthesis AI, Jasper and Cohere.

*This is an updated version of an article first published by the Investing News Network in 2023. *

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Securities Disclosure: I, Meagen Seatter, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.