While consumer technology stocks had soared in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, back then, their share price gains were due to. the growing demand for technology products and services due to lock downs. Now, big technology stocks have persisted in their strong performance despite high interest rates since they have been judged by the market as the top innovators and performers in the artificial intelligence industry.
Since AI is somewhat of a ubiquitous technology, its impact is on several industries. So far, we’ve seen most of the stock market returns related to AI directly tied to just one stock. This stock continued to be the fifth most trending AI stocks as recently as in mid October and its share price returns are nothing short of unbelievable. From its bottom in October 2022 when the split adjusted share price was a mere $11.23, the shares have gained a stunning 1,100%. In other words, if you had invested just $100 back then in the shares and then held onto them for dear life, your investment would be worth $1,200 today.
This is the magic of AI, a technology that has caught Wall Street and retail investors alike by storm. However, AI’s impact, and its enablement, aren’t limited to the GPU designer we’ve mentioned above. While GPUs are the ‘oil’ for this technology, a wide variety of other components from data center infrastructure, networking equipment, connectivity, and energy all will have to play their part if OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s plans of initially building as many as 7 AI data centers across the US, with each data center guzzling an unbelievable 5 Gigawatts of electricity, are to come to fruition.
This then makes us ask, what are such stocks that might enable 35 Gigawatts of AI data centers across the US? After all, in order to meet the world’s demand for AI chips, Altman believes that an unfathomable $7 trillion will need to be spent for building 36 chip manufacturing fabs and additional AI data centers. This money has to be spent somewhere, and therein lies the answer to our question. Things get clearer when we look at a detailed research report from investment bank Goldman Sachs. This report segregated the AI sector into four categories.
The first category only included Wall Street’s AI darling, the second was made of AI capacity providers like server companies, other semiconductor firms, and utilities, the third included firms that sell AI products and software, and the fourth category firms were those that will benefit from AI adoption. In its report, the investment bank shared that year to date in July, the first category had returned 139%. As of mid October, this category has gained 179% on the stock market, so safe to say returns have accelerated despite some turbulence in between. By July, the second group of firms was also doing well. Its returns ranged between ~-8% to ~50%, with the average stock having delivered 22%.
Zooming into these firms, the utility sector is one which had particularly impressed the bank. It shared that utilities were the best performing sector in the flagship S&P index between March and May courtesy of their 16% returns. Their three month returns ranked in the 98th percentile since 2022 and were the third highest after 2003 and 2020 rallies. This outperformance is unsurprising given the strong investments in data centers that have taken the US by storm this year.
These investments have led to estimates suggesting that America’s data center hub, Northern Virginia, will require 11,000 megawatts of electricity by 2035 – demand which has already spurred $5.2 billion in investments for transmission lines and coal fired power plants. Estimates from Boston Consulting Group believe that by 2030, AI will account for 16% of America’s energy consumption and touch 130 gigawatts. For a detailed look at the link between electricity use and data centers, you should read 15 Best Data Center Stocks To Buy According to Jefferies, Citi and Wall Street Analysts.
The bustling optimism surrounding AI is also reflected in revenue estimates. Goldman’s September 2024 research shows that 2025 revenue estimates of semiconductor firms, software enablers, and hardware firms except semiconductors are roughly 2.3x, 2.05x, and 1.8x over 2019 levels, respectively. Similarly, non semiconductor hardware companies have seen their revenue forecasts for Q4 2025 jump to $450 billion for a $380 billion gain over Q1 2024’s $70 billion. Makes us wonder whether it’s this group of companies that might see a stock mirror the 1,100% returns of Wall Street’s AI darling.
Our Methodology
To make our list of Goldman Sachs’ best phase 2 AI stocks, we ranked the 20 stocks with the highest year to date returns and some other big tech and data center names that have announced multi billion dollars in capital expenditure by their year to date performance.
For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points. (see more details here).
A close up of a confident investor making a decisive transaction in the stock market.
Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) is another storage focused hardware and software company that caters to the needs of the data center industry. The firm operates primarily through its Evergreen model which enables businesses to manage their storage consumption based on need instead of pre defined packages. This makes Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG)’s products attractive to businesses on a budget, and the firm also competes in the market by enabling users to bypass slower solid state drives from their storage architecture and rely primarily on faster flash storage instead. Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG)’s Pure//E family of products provides an end to end flash storage option for all kinds of data sets and offers storage for as much as 30 petabytes of data. However, while up 52.79% year to date, the shares are down by 13% since late August after the firm revised downwards its STaaS bookings downward by $100 million for a 25% growth over the previous estimate of 50% growth.
Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG)’s management attributed this to tighter evaluations. Here’s what they shared during the Q2 2025 earnings call:
“Well, I think your supposition would be correct if customers — the same customer was switching from an Evergreen//One deal to a CapEx deal. What we’ve seen instead is large opportunities — large Evergreen//One opportunity staying opportunities longer than we expected and therefore stretching out. A little bit whether that’s based on caution or whether that’s based on by the customer or whether that’s based on other — we had indicated that customers are looking very closely at their subscription expenses now given increases in software and SaaS expenses that were raised over the year. We’ve yet to really fully diagnose that. But what we’re seeing is a lengthening of large deal size Evergreen//One opportunities.”
Overall PSTG ranks 17th on our list of Goldman Sachs' top phase 2 AI stocks. While we acknowledge the potential of PSTG as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than PSTG but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
