Let’s be honest:
Everybody wishes they’d bought NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock in late 2022. Whether you actually bought it or not, you’re probably aware of the fact that it massively outperformed the global stock markets from early 2023 to late 2025, thanks to its utter dominance of AI accelerator chips.
Accelerator chips are designed to handle ultra-heavy AI workloads in ultra-speedy fashion. NVIDIA, a company known for manufacturing gaming chips, was a natural fit for making AI accelerator chips, as the GPUs it already made had the highest processing power of any type of chip. So, when AI started rising, NVIDIA pivoted to AI chips, and promptly made a killing off them. From the start of its run in early 2023 to today, it has gained 1,123% — outperforming the market about 10:1. Nice!
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. Today, many competing companies are starting to catch up with NVIDIA’s work in AI. In China, domestically made chips have gotten so advanced that the government isn’t even letting Chinese companies use NVIDIA’s offerings! Likewise, U.S. companies like AMD are making headway. In this article, I share my top three AI stocks to buy and hold — not one of which is NVIDIA.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC)
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), or TSMC for short, is a chipmaking company like NVIDIA. It’s a fab; the type of company that actually manufactures the chips that NVIDIA designs. NVIDIA relies on TSMC to build its chips because manufacturing requires expertise that designers like NVIDIA don’t necessarily have. TSMC has been rising along with NVIDIA in recent years, as it’s making a portion of NVIDIA’s money. However, TSMC has more optionality than NVIDIA does. It manufactures chips for all of NVIDIA’s competitors as well as NVIDIA itself. So whoever wins in the AI chip space, TSM makes money off it.
TSM is the stock that I bought when I started noticing NVIDIA’s success with AI chips. As a value investor, I found NVIDIA’s high multiples scary, and considered TSM a cheaper alternative. Ultimately, I doubled my money on TSMC stock by the time I sold (too early, alas)!
Alphabet
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL), better known as Google, is a company that is involved in all aspects of the AI industry, which makes it a full-stack AI company. It manufactures chips (tensor processing units). It builds AI models (the Gemini family). It runs an AI cloud business. And finally, it uses AI in dozens of invisible ways at its companies, including YouTube and Google search.
Google has been a top player in the tech world for some time. In the era of AI, it looks poised to continue leading.
Shopify
Shopify (TSX:SHOP) is Canada’s very own AI success story. It is an e-commerce company that uses AI to help businesses write product descriptions, design marketing imagery, and build out their brands. The company is a well-established player in the world of e-commerce, being the top e-commerce platform for high-end “branded” companies. Shopify was doing fine before AI, but now, with its AI tools, it empowers business owners to save on marketing costs. It’s a great company.
