Prediction: This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Could Be the Surprise Winner of 2025
Key Takeaways
Similar to last year, stocks such as Palantir, Nvidia, and Microsoft remain among the hottest names driving the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.
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July 5, 2025
09:43 AM
The Motley Fool
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Similar to last year, stocks such as Palantir, Nvidia, and Microsoft remain among the hottest names driving the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution
Through the first six months of the year, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes each gained roughly 5%
Similar to last year, some of the biggest gainers in the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape so far include Palantir nologies, Constellation Energy, and Oracle
By contrast, several members of the megacap collective known as the "Magnificent Seven" have witnessed sell-offs throughout 2025
One member sticks out among the pack, though
As of closing bell on July 1, s of Meta Platforms (META 0. 73%) have gained 23% on the year -- quietly outperforming all of its peers
If Meta has gone overlooked in your for the next big AI opportunity, I wouldn't be surprised
Yet savvy investors seem to understand how AI has the potential to completely transform Meta from a social media and gaming empire into something far more sophisticated
Let's explore some of the moves Meta has made this year that you may have missed
While Nvidia and Microsoft remain solid picks, Meta could be the surprise winner among megacap AI stocks this year
Meta has a history of identifying hot trends and talent Meta Platforms was originally called Facebook and only rebranded to its new name a few years ago
Facebook was an early pioneer in social media -- bringing a new dimension to how people communicated and connected
Fairly early on in Facebook's history, the company made two surprising multibillion-dollar acquisitions -- Instagram and WhatsApp
At the time, both of these deals looked head-scratchers
Instagram was a pre-revenue start-up whose main duct was a photo application that allowed users to apply cool s to their pictures
WhatsApp was a text messaging tool with little presence in the U. (one of Facebook's core )
As investors know today, Instagram and WhatsApp have completely revolutionized Meta's
By augmenting the Facebook platform with other applications, Meta essentially built an ecosystem of apps that can be used by both people and es a -- helping them with everything from social connection to e-commerce, marketing, advertising, and more
While these moves strategically positioned Meta during the early phases of desktop and mobile internet, the company now needs to ve it can adjust to the nology world's newest megatrend: AI
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta is using its old playbook of acquisitions and strategic capital allocation to build its AI operation
Image source: Getty Images
Meta just went on another shopping spree Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently unveiled his new vision for the company, called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
As part of MSL's creation, Meta has already spent billions across strategic investments and acquiring top talent away from competitors
For example, last month Meta announced it is $14. 3 billion into Scale AI
The company has also been aggressively hiring reers from ChatGPT developer OpenAI
Multiple media outlets have reported that Meta is offering these OpenAI employees signing bonuses of up to $100 million to sweeten the package
It's un how accurate these reports are, or how many OpenAI workers might have accepted the posed deal, but it's inspiring stuff anyhow
Scale AI specializes in annotating large datasets accurately and efficiently
This is important criteria for training and scaling AI models
As such, accessing Scale AI's cesses will ly help Meta imve its own algorithms as it relates to personalized recommendation s across its various social platforms and the billions of people who use them
Is Meta stock a buy right now
When Meta acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, the underlying thesis wasn't simply for the company to add more users
Rather, the idea was to complement Facebook with other perties, and over time, evolve those platforms to help build long-term value for both individual users and es a
Similarly, by heavily into AI infrastructure, Meta is now positioning itself to bring its social, gaming, commerce, and advertising es to an unparalleled level
AI will help Meta monetize its vast and growing user data in new ways, ushering in new waves of revenue and fitability
META PE Ratio data by YCharts Yet even with such robust growth spects, Meta still trades at price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 28 -- a steep discount to some of the more main AI opportunities among big
To me, Meta's long-term potential in the AI realm is being overlooked
Moreover, now with a bevy of new talent running MSL, I'm optimistic some big and positive changes are in store
With that in mind, the second half of 2025 could bring some interesting surprises to Meta
I think the stock is a no-brainer for investors with a long-term time horizon, and I see the price action above as a reasonable entry point into the stock
Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors
Adam Spatacco has positions in Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir nologies
The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Constellation Energy, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir nologies
The Motley Fool recommends the ing options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft
The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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