The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is now the main engine driving the growth of some of the world’s most valuable companies. Many of these technology giants use AI not only to cut costs or boost efficiency, but to help transform entire industries and build platforms that are likely to be the drivers of global expansion over the next decade.

For investors with a long-term mindset, the smartest move now is to target the best of these businesses based on their proven cutting-edge technologies, scale, and long-term vision. Let’s highlight two of these AI players taking a leading role and find out why they are well-positioned to create significant value in the long run.

1. Nvidia

Semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA -1.55%) is the undisputable leader in the global AI infrastructure market. The company’s cutting-edge GPUs have become the backbone of AI workloads worldwide and help power massive cloud data centers and enterprise AI applications.

Nvidia’s recent financial performance highlights its business momentum. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026 (ended July 27, 2025), revenue surged 56% year over year to $46.7 billion, driven by explosive demand for its new Blackwell platform. The company began production shipments of its new Blackwell Ultra GB300 racks in the second quarter, marking a smooth transition from the earlier GB200 systems. Net income was also up 59% year over year to $26.2 billion.

Nvidia has transformed itself from a gaming-focused GPU provider to a full-stack AI platform player. Beyond hardware, the company has built a strong competitive moat with its proprietary Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) parallel computing software platform, used to optimally program GPUs. With over 5.9 million developers using CUDA worldwide, the company has created an exceptionally strong developer ecosystem that raises switching costs for clients.

Nvidia has also made rapid advances in AI-optimized networking solutions. Management highlighted that NVLink 72, an advanced interconnect architecture used in Blackwell AI platform, enables each rack (enclosure used to organize multiple data center servers) to operate as a single computer, significantly improving efficiency for reasoning and agentic AI workloads — an advantage that is becoming critical as data centers face power constraints.

Nvidia is also focusing on opportunities in areas such as robotics, automotive, and automation. Spending on AI infrastructure globally is projected to be somewhere between $3 trillion and $4 trillion by the end of the decade. Nvidia is well-positioned to be a key recipient of this spending.

Although the company trades at a rich valuation of 39.5 times forward earnings, Nvidia’s robust growth prospects make it an exceptional pick for long-term investors — even at elevated valuation levels.

2. Microsoft

Microsoft (MSFT -1.13%) is positioning itself as a foundational platform in the AI-powered economy, building a comprehensive ecosystem of AI products and large-scale technology infrastructure. Once known primarily for its productivity suite and Windows operating system, the company is now embedding Copilot virtual AI assistant and agentic AI capabilities across its core offerings. Subsequently, the company is reshaping how clients organize and execute workflows.

Copilot (across all applications) counts over 100 million monthly active users, and its backend is powered by GPT-5. The company expects Copilot to help users connect with specialized AI agents for solving business challenges.

Microsoft is also strengthening the cloud, data, and model infrastructure that powers Copilot and the growing ecosystem of AI products. The company’s Azure computing business, which forms the hardware layer of its technology infrastructure, crossed an annualized run rate of $75 billion, up 34% year over year at the end of the second quarter. Although the company has built over 400 Azure data centers across 70 regions and has added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity in the past year, it is still seeing demand outpacing supply. This highlights the growth potential in the data center space.

Microsoft Fabric, an AI-powered data and analytics platform, is rapidly gaining traction, with revenue soaring 55% year over year in the second quarter. The company is also positioning Azure AI Foundry as the model layer to help clients build and manage AI applications and agents at scale. Foundry was used by over 80% of the Fortune 500, while the Foundry Agent services are powering agent development at more than 14,000 enterprises.

Microsoft’s security offerings are also strengthening its business. The security business caters to nearly 1.5 million customers and had already generated over $20 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023 (ended June 30, 2023). The security business will become even more significant, as the rising adoption of generative AI has also added new ways in which hackers can break into an enterprise system. Additionally, it is also tightly integrated into Copilot and the Microsoft 365 suite, which further strengthens its value proposition.

Microsoft trades at about 37.4 times forward earnings. This rich valuation, however, is supported by its accelerating AI-driven growth. With rising Copilot adoption, expanding Azure scale, and a fast-growing security business, it is proving to be a smart buy for long-term investors.

What makes this development feel so distinct is the sheer integration of services. While Western consumers often rely on fragmented apps to manage health data, Asia’s “super-apps” consolidate functions into single ecosystems.

For example, WeChat alone hosts over two dozen mini-programmes focused on nutrition tracking and personalised meal planning, with some achieving user satisfaction ratings close to 3.9 out of 5. Users can track meals, receive AI-generated dietary recommendations and consult dietitians without leaving their main messaging platform. Start-ups are taking notice.

The South Korean app Monolabs launched a nutrition service on WeChat, reportedly choosing China as its first overseas market in a clear recognition of the Chinese platform’s reach and infrastructure.

These ecosystems are not merely aggregating services; they are enabling the rise of personalised nutrition intelligence. When a user places an order through Grab or Gojek, AI can be leveraged to tailor suggestions for individual dietary preferences.

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is carrying serious momentum right now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing. Data center hardware suppliers like Nvidia are experiencing more demand than they can possibly supply, as the latest AI models require significantly more computing power than their predecessors.

As AI software becomes smarter and more capable, companies like Upstart Holdings (UPST 0.22%) and DigitalOcean (DOCN -1.66%) are likely to experience accelerating growth. In fact, here’s why investors with a spare $1,000 (money they don’t need for immediate expenses) might want to split it equally between shares of Upstart and DigitalOcean, and hold on to them for the long term.

1. The case for Upstart

Banks have relied on Fair Isaac‘s FICO credit scoring system to measure the creditworthiness of potential borrowers for more than 30 years. However, it only takes into account a handful of factors, like a person’s existing debts and their repayment history, so Upstart believes it’s outdated.

The company developed an AI-powered algorithm that can analyze a whopping 2,500 data points on each potential borrower to get a better sense of their ability to repay a loan, and it can deliver instant, fully automated approvals 92% of the time. It would take days or even weeks to parse the same amount of data using traditional human-led assessment methods.

Upstart specializes in unsecured personal loans, automotive loans, and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). The company doesn’t lend any money itself, but rather it originates loans on behalf of banks, credit unions, and car dealers. It originated 372,599 approvals across all segments during the second quarter of 2025 (ended June 30), which was up by a whopping 159% from the year-ago period. The loans had a dollar value of $2.8 billion, which was a three-year high.

The surge in Q2 originations resulted in $257 million in revenue, representing a year-over-year increase of 102%. It marked the fourth consecutive quarter in which revenue growth accelerated, and it places the company on track to deliver more than $1 billion in annual revenue for the very first time this year.

Simply put, Upstart’s business is on the road to recovery right now after a brutal couple of years between 2022 and 2024, marred by a two-decade high in interest rates that crushed demand for credit. Rates have started to come down, and Wall Street anticipates three cuts by the Federal Reserve before this year is over, which will help Upstart build on its recent momentum.

Upstart CEO Dave Girouard thinks AI will replace all human-led loan assessment methods over the next decade, leaving a $25 trillion pool of annual originations up for grabs for AI-powered algorithms. This could translate to $1 trillion in annual fee revenue, so Upstart has an enormous market opportunity ahead.

2. The case for DigitalOcean

The cloud computing industry is dominated by tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, but they typically fight over the largest customers because they have the deepest pockets. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, exclusively serves small and midsize businesses (SMBs). It offers cheap pricing, highly personalized service, and a user-friendly dashboard, which is ideal for enterprises with limited technical expertise.

DigitalOcean can help SMBs store data, host websites, deliver video streaming services, develop software, and more. But the company also has an expanding portfolio of services designed to help businesses deploy AI software. It operates data centers powered by graphics processing units from top suppliers like Nvidia, and it allows SMBs to start with just one chip and scale up as necessary, which is perfect for small AI workloads like customer service chatbots.

DigitalOcean also launched a new AI platform called Gradient this year. It’s a cloud-based workspace with all the tools an SMB needs to develop AI software, including ready-made large language models from leading providers like OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Anthropic, which they can use to accelerate their progress. Gradient can also be used to create AI agents, which can be trained to assist with tasks like data analysis and even writing computer code.

According to management’s most recent guidance, DigitalOcean is on track to generate up to $890 million in revenue in 2025, which would be a record high. AI will be a critical part of the long-term growth story here — while the company’s total revenue grew by 14% year over year during the second quarter, its AI revenue soared by more than 100%.

Investors have an opportunity to scoop DigitalOcean stock up at a very attractive level right now. It’s trading at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of just 4.3, which is a near-50% discount to its average of 8.5 since going public in 2021, so this could be a great long-term entry point.