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.