10 Best AI Stock Picks of Motley Fool Asset Management

In this article, we will discuss the 10 Best AI Stock Picks of Motley Fool Asset Management.

Motley Fool Asset Management offers a range of ETFs that give investors exposure to a diversified basket of stocks. Its flagship fund, the Motley Fool 100 Index ETF (TMFC), had about $1.6 billion in assets as of last year. The ETF focuses on high-quality U.S. companies. In 2025, the fund delivered mixed results relative to its benchmark. The Motley Fool 100 Index ETF (TMFC) gained 1.97% in the fourth quarter, trailing the S&P 500 Total Return Index, which rose 2.66%. For the full year, however, the ETF returned 19.97%, outperforming the benchmark’s 17.88% gain.

Motley Fool Asset Management believes in long-term investing. In a recent post on its website, it mentioned some interesting data points that are very important, especially in the context of today’s highly volatile markets. According to the piece, data shows that about 50% of the S&P 500’s best 50 days between 1995 and 2024 occurred during bear markets.  An initial investment of $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 1995 would have risen to $224,279 by 2024 if it had remained fully invested, while missing just the 10 best-performing days over that period would have left an investor with 54% less.

For this article, we scanned Motley Fool Asset Management’s Q4 portfolio and chose its 10 biggest AI stock picks in terms of stake value. 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 498.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 303 percentage points (see more details here).

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10. Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA)

Motley Fool Asset Management’s Stake: $66.79 Million

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares are down 8% so far this year, and bears believe the selloff could continue. Tesla’s profitability and margins are eroding due to falling market share as the company loses pricing power in a bid to gain customers. Tesla Q4 deliveries fell 16% year over year amid intense competition from other EV makers. Chinese auto giant BYD earlier this year surpassed Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles on a calendar-year basis.

In Q1 this year, Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles, while Wall Street was expecting about 370,000 deliveries.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) bulls point to Cybertruck as a potential new growth engine. However,  registration and delivery tracking data indicate that Cybertruck volumes remain a small fraction of Tesla’s overall shipments.  In Q1, Tesla Cybertruck deliveries hit the lowest figure since deliveries began in November 2023.

Despite these weaknesses, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) has a forward P/E of 166x, highlighting a massive premium even after recent declines.

JPMorgan believes Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) faces a significant downside amid weak fundamentals, delivery trends and a year-over-year decline in energy storage installations. The firm also highlighted what it sees as a disconnect between fundamentals and valuation, noting that Tesla shares are trading more than 50% higher than when deliveries peaked in June 2022, despite sluggish delivery growth since then. JPMorgan maintained its $145 price target for Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), which indicates a massive downsize compared with the current level.

Baron Partners Fund stated the following regarding Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) in its fourth quarter 2025 investor letter:

“In 2025, we exited 30.5% of our position in Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA). We are extremely confident in the company’s prospects and ability to become a significantly more valuable business. The Fund completed its purchase of Tesla shares in 2016 with an ending portfolio weight of 9.6% of total investments. Its average cost of all purchases in the Fund was only $14.22 per share. Due to significant appreciation in the stock, the position increased to 26.7% of the portfolio’s total investments at the end of 2025. Despite offsetting some of the volatility caused by the position’s weight with more stable and uncorrelated investments, Tesla’s stock movements caused increased variability in the entire portfolio. We entered into agreements with a large investment bank to dispose of a portion of the holdings through a redemption in-kind because, we believe, it would have minimal impact on the share price and low transaction costs. Tesla remains a top holding of the Fund. The disposition was a portfolio construction decision and not reflective of reduced confidence in the business.”

9. Visa Inc. (NYSE:V)

Motley Fool Asset Management’s Stake: $67.06 Million

Visa is down about 10% so far this year. Visa (NYSE:V) operates one of the strongest moats in global finance, running the world’s largest payments network and processing. It dominates the global card network industry with roughly 50%+ credit card market share, significantly ahead of Mastercard and American Express. Visa (NYSE:V) is positioned to benefit from a secular shift as the global digital payments market is projected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2029. As trillions of dollars in paper currency transition to digital rails, Visa (NYSE:V) remains a key beneficiary of this trend.

Visa (NYSE:V) is trading at approximately 24x-25x forward earnings, which is a significant discount compared to its 5-year average of roughly 30x-32x.

Ironvine Capital Partners stated the following regarding Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) in its Q4 2025 investor letter:

“Global payment network Visa Inc. (NYSE:V) are uniquely durable businesses, deeply embedded in the plumbing of global commerce thanks to network effects that have been reinforced over several decades. As the connective tissue between card issuers (deposit and lending institutions), merchants, and card holders, Visa and Mastercard remove friction and fraud from the payment process in mostly invisible ways across hundreds of millions of daily transactions. Today, one easily takes for granted the ability to safely pay nearly any entity in the world with minimal cost or complexity. Visa and Mastercard’s unrivaled scale allow them to provide essential payment services to billions of cardholders and 150+ million merchants for a fraction of a penny per dollar transacted while generating tremendous economics for owners..” (Click here to read the full text).

8. Mastercard Inc. (NYSE:MA)

Motley Fool Asset Management’s Stake: $68.68 Million

Mastercard Inc. (NYSE:MA) is one of the best-positioned stocks to benefit from global economic growth and the continued shift toward digital payments. Based on Wall Street estimates, the company is expected to deliver around 15% EPS growth in 2026 and 2027,  and about 16%+ increase in 2028. This growth is supported by secular tailwinds such as rising digital payments penetration, cross-border travel recovery, and continued shift away from cash across both developed and emerging markets.

New growth catalysts for the stock include expansion into value-added services, deeper penetration in co-branded card partnerships, and strategic moves into next-generation payment rails, including stablecoin infrastructure through its planned BVNK acquisition.

Mastercard Inc. (NYSE:MA) trades at a forward P/E of roughly mid-20s (~25x), below its historical average.

Ironvine Capital Partners stated the following regarding Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) in its Q4 2025 investor letter:

“Global payment network Visa and Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA) are uniquely durable businesses, deeply embedded in the plumbing of global commerce thanks to network effects that have been reinforced over several decades. As the connective tissue between card issuers (deposit and lending institutions), merchants, and card holders, Visa and Mastercard remove friction and fraud from the payment process in mostly invisible ways across hundreds of millions of daily transactions. Today, one easily takes for granted the ability to safely pay nearly any entity in the world with minimal cost or complexity. Visa and Mastercard’s unrivaled scale allow them to provide essential payment services to billions of cardholders and 150+ million merchants for a fraction of a penny per dollar transacted while generating tremendous economics for owners… (Click here to read the full text).

7. Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO)

Motley Fool Asset Management’s Stake: $72.93 Million

Major companies are lining up for Broadcom’s custom AI chips. The company recently made headlines after signing deals with Meta, Google and Anthropic.

Broadcom is a leader in the custom AI chip market, where demand is rising as companies look to cut reliance on expensive Nvidia chips. According to a Deloitte report, the custom AI chip market is expected to exceed $50 billion in 2026, driven by a shift in workloads from training to inference, which will account for roughly two-thirds of all compute that year. While lighter inference tasks can be handled on PCs and smartphones with onboard accelerators, enterprise and hyperscale workloads still require high-performance, custom-designed chips to efficiently manage post-training and test-time scaling.

What’s Broadcom’s moat? There are only a few companies capable of delivering high‑performance custom chips tailored for large‑scale AI workloads, and that specialization delivers real economic advantages. While Nvidia’s GPUs dominate general‑purpose AI compute, Broadcom designs application‑specific ASICs and XPUs that hyperscalers prefer for massive inference tasks because they can reduce total cost of ownership by roughly 40–60% compared with GPU clusters, especially in steady, predictable production environments. AVGO ranks seventh in our list of the best AI stocks to buy according to Motley Fool Asset Management.

Clearbridge Dividend Strategy stated the following regarding Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:

“In IT, we exited Oracle and trimmed Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO). On the semiconductor side, we modestly reduced our position in Broadcom to fund our new investment in Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). While Broadcom remains well positioned, and we remain constructive on the stock, the risk-reward outlook has diminished as the shares have tripled over the last two years. Further, whereas TSMC prospers regardless of who wins the semiconductor race (TSMC manufacturers chips for all the major semiconductor companies), one can conceive of scenarios where Broadcom could become less relevant in the future.”

6. Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META)

Motley Fool Asset Management’s Stake: $76.06 Million

Mark Zuckerberg is on a spending spree despite Wall Street concerns about ROI, but bulls believe this huge CapEx would make sense in the long term. Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has already started to see results of using AI technology.

Meta Platforms’ (NASDAQ:META) AI-powered ads platform Advantage+ improves return for advertisers, which can in turn increase budget allocation toward Meta’s platforms. Market research firm eMarketer estimates that Meta’s net digital advertising revenue could reach approximately $240+ billion by 2026, slightly ahead of Alphabet’s Google in the same category. Meta has over 3 billion daily active users across its family of apps. This scale provides both data advantages for AI training and consistent operating cash flow to fund infrastructure expansion without balance sheet stress.

For the first quarter of 2026, Meta expects $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion in revenue,  ahead of analyst estimates of $51.41 billion. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) is also planning to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips by accelerating the deployment of its own custom silicon, the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), to lower long-term compute costs. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) is down 2 so far this year, and its forward P/E is now 21x, down from its historical average of 25.5x and lower than major Magnificent Seven peers and the broader industry average for high-growth tech.

Ads remain one of the biggest strengths of Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META). Advertising revenue reached $196 billion in 2025, up 22% year over year. The company is already using AI to improve ad targeting. Its generative advertising model, built on an LLM-inspired approach, helped drive a 3.5% increase in Facebook ad clicks and a more than 1% gain in Instagram conversions in the fourth quarter.

Meta ranks sixth in our list of the best AI stocks to buy according to Motley Fool Asset Management.

Harding Loevner Global Equity Strategy stated the following regarding Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its fourth quarter 2025 investor letter:

“Meta Platforms, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:META) business remained sturdy, markets began questioning whether AI-enabled gains in user engagement and ad targeting are nearing their limits. Investors also grew concerned that margins would decrease next year because of increased spending on AI infrastructure and workers.”

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