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3 Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Buy in January
One of the biggest themes in the stock market in 2024 was artificial intelligence (AI), which is showing signs of becoming a breakthrough technology. That said, AI still appears to be in the early innings, with 2025 still promising a lot of opportunities in the sector.
Let's look at three AI stocks to buy this month.
1. Nvidia
Nvidia(NASDAQ: NVDA) has arguably been the biggest winner from AI, as its revenue absolutely skyrocketed the past two years. In fiscal year 2024, ended in January of last year, its revenue grew 125%, while in fiscal year 2025, its revenue is set to more than double once again.
The company's graphic processing units (GPUs) are the backbone of the AI infrastructure build-out due to GPUs' impressive processing speed, which is needed to handle large language model (LLM) training and AI inference. Meanwhile, it amassed a whopping 90% market share in the GPU space over rival Advanced Micro Devices due to its superior software platform CUDA, which includes developer tools and micro-libraries that easily allow its chips to be programmed to handle various AI-related tasks.
Spending on AI infrastructure only continues to accelerate, as LLMs need more and more computing power to be trained on. Meanwhile, Nvidia's largest customer Microsoft(NASDAQ: MSFT) announced it would spend around $80 billion this calendar year on AI data centers.
Typically, about half that spending goes toward servers with GPUs. By comparison, for its last fiscal year ended in June, Microsoft spent $44.5 billion in capital expenditures (capex). With other large customers also ramping up capex spending on AI infrastructure this year, Nvidia still has a lot of growth ahead.
Despite its strong stock performance, Nvidia trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of about 31.5, based on 2025 analyst estimates, and a price/earnings-to-growth ratio (PEG) of 0.98. A PEG under 1 is generally view as undervalued, and growth stocks will often trade with PEGs well above 1.
Image source: Getty Images.
2. Microsoft
Microsoft is planning to spend big on AI infrastructure this year, and for good reason. The company's cloud computing unit Azure has been a big AI winner, showing revenue growth of 33% last quarter, while its Azure OpenAI usage doubled in the past six months. Azure is a consumption model, and customers are using its services to help built out their own AI agents and applications. This is also leading to more usage of its data and analytics services.
While Azure has been showing strong growth, it could be even more robust if not for capacity constraints. It has already forecast that Azure revenue will begin to accelerate in the second half of its fiscal year as more capacity comes on from past capex spending. Meanwhile, it is pouring a ton of money into building out data centers across the world to try and keep up with demand.
In addition to cloud computing, the company also has a big opportunity on the AI software side with its AI assistant copilots for its Microsoft 365 suite of productivity tools. For $30 a month per enterprise use, Microsoft provides AI copilots for its variety of productivity tools that can do such things as organize and prioritize emails, create PowerPoint presentations using only natural language, and even use the Python programming language in Excel using only natural language prompts. These AI copilots can save workers a lot of time and should be a big growth driver for the company moving forward.
Trading at a P/E of 32.5 current fiscal year estimates, the stock is reasonably valued.
3. Salesforce
Salesforce(NYSE: CRM) is looking to become the leader in agentic AI, which is believed to be the next evolution of AI beyond generative AI. With generative AI, users can create content via a prompt, such as asking ChatGPT to create a vacation itinerary. Agentic AI would take that to the next level by going out on its own and booking everything needed for that vacation, such as flights, hotels, dinner reservations, and tour guides.
Long the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, the company launched its agentic AI platform Agentforce in October, with an improved version announced in mid-December. The platform offers a variety of out-of-the-box agents that users can customize through its no-code and low-code tools, while customers will be able to build their own agents from scratch as well. Out-of-the-box agents are available in such areas as sales, marketing, recruiting, and customer service, among others.
Salesforce has seen early rapid adoption of Agentforce, with the company saying in early December that it had closed 200 teams, while in mid-December it said it had closed more than 1,000. It has projected it will have 1 billion Agentforce AI agents deployed by the end of its fiscal 2026 (ending January 2026). Agentforce is a consumption product that costs $2 per conversation, so this is a big opportunity moving forward for the company.
The stock currently trades at a reasonable value of 29 times fiscal 2026 earnings and a PEG of 0.8.
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Geoffrey Seiler has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
