The AI industry in early 2026 shows that spending is still rising quickly: Gartner projects worldwide AI spending to reach $2.52 trillion in 2026, up 44% year over year. But the mix matters. A large share is still going into infrastructure rather than finished business outcomes, with AI-optimized servers alone expected to account for $329.5 billion and AI processing semiconductors $267.9 billion in 2026. That suggests the industry is still building its base even as adoption broadens.
On the enterprise side, the industry appears to be moving from pilot programs toward wider operational use, though not evenly. Deloitte’s 2026 enterprise AI report says worker access to AI rose by 50% in 2025, and the share of companies with at least 40% of AI projects in production is expected to double within six months. At the same time, only 34% of organizations in that report were described as truly reimagining the business around AI, which suggests deployment is advancing faster than organizational redesign. OpenAI’s 2025 enterprise report points in the same direction: weekly ChatGPT Enterprise messages increased roughly 8x over the past year, while use of structured workflows such as Projects and Custom GPTs rose 19x year to date.
Gartner explicitly states that incumbent software providers are likely to be the primary channel for enterprise AI in 2026. Second, the infrastructure burden will continue to grow. The IEA says data-centre electricity consumption was about 415 TWh in 2024 and is projected to rise to around 945 TWh by 2030, with AI the main driver of that increase. In other words, the industry is still expanding, but scaling it now depends as much on power, chips, workflow redesign, and implementation discipline as on model quality itself.
Methodology
We used screeners to narrow down on AI-exposed stocks in the technology industry. We screened for stocks with a market cap over $1 billion, a 3M price change of 5-30%, and the 50-day simple moving average crossing the 200-day simple moving average. We limited our final selection to companies that have recently reported noteworthy developments likely to impact investor sentiment. These stocks are also popular among analysts and elite hedge funds.
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).
10. A10 Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ATEN)
A10 Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ATEN) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On February 20, 2026, BWS Financial raised its price target on A10 Networks to $28 from $24 and maintained its Buy rating. The firm said A10’s network security business is positioned to benefit from the proliferation of AI-related network traffic and noted that the company’s growth outlook through 2028 is stronger than its outlook for 2026. BWS also highlighted A10’s fundamentals, including a 79% gross margin and 11% trailing-12-month revenue growth.
That call followed A10 Networks’ February 4, 2026, fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results. The company reported record fourth-quarter revenue of $80.4 million and full-year revenue of $290.6 million, up 11.0% year over year. Full-year GAAP net income was $42.1 million, while non-GAAP net income was $66.3 million. For 2026, A10 projected revenue growth of 10% to 12%. Management said the company is benefiting from demand tied to AI infrastructure, high-throughput networking, and customer data center buildouts.
A10 Networks, Inc. (NYSE:ATEN) provides security and infrastructure solutions that help enterprises, service providers, cloud operators, and web-scale companies secure applications and manage network performance.
9. NetScout Systems (NASDAQ:NTCT)
NetScout Systems (NASDAQ:NTCT) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On February 19, 2026, NETSCOUT announced that it had extended its Omnis AI Insights offering to communications service providers, aiming to turn raw network traffic into AI-ready smart data for customer experience and network operations. The company said the move is meant to help telecom operators deploy AI agents for predictive maintenance, service assurance, and security while reducing costs and operational risk. NETSCOUT added that its Omnis AI Sensor for Service Providers delivers real-time curated data across environments, including 5G, RAN, Core, MEC, and Transport, while its Omnis AI Streamer is designed to turn large volumes of network telemetry into smaller, usable data feeds for AI agents, analytics platforms, and operations teams.
The company also pointed to a McKinsey survey of telecom executives cited in the release, which found that 64% are scaling AI efforts, while 45% identified data as the main barrier to scaling. NETSCOUT said it would showcase the offering at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on March 2-5, 2026.
NETSCOUT Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTCT) provides observability, AIOps, cybersecurity, and DDoS protection solutions, serving enterprises, service providers, and public sector organizations.
8. Wex Inc. (NYSE:WEX)
Wex Inc. (NYSE:WEX) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 6, 2026, Investing.com reported that Raymond James maintained its Market Perform rating on Wex Inc. (NYSE:WEX) after a fireside chat with management at the firm’s 47th annual Institutional Investors Conference in Orlando. Raymond James analyst Madison Suhr met with Chief Executive Officer Melissa Smith and Senior Vice President of Investor Relations Steve Elder. The analyst said quarter-to-date volume trends were developing as expected and that higher fuel prices were acting as a tailwind.
Raymond James also noted positive indicators in spot rates in the over-the-road segment, although management said the timing of a recovery in actual miles driven remains uncertain. The firm said it was comfortable with the implied ramp in Wex’s 2026 Mobility outlook, viewed Corporate Payments revenue as likely to remain stable through the year, and said the Benefits business appeared positioned to keep growing accounts at above-market rates. Raymond James added that it left the discussion with greater confidence in Wex’s growth algorithm and its path to sustainable mid-single-digit-plus revenue growth.
Wex Inc. (NYSE:WEX) is a global commerce platform focused on fleet mobility, corporate payments, and employee benefits solutions.
7. EverCommerce Inc. (NASDAQ:EVCM)
EverCommerce Inc. (NASDAQ:EVCM) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 10, EverCommerce Inc. announced that its healthcare business unit, EverHealth, launched EverHealth Scribe, a new AI-powered technology embedded in the DrChrono electronic health record platform (EHR). EverHealth Scribe listens to provider-patient conversations and automatically generates structured visit notes within the EHR platform. This allows clinicians to review and approve documentation more efficiently. On this occasion, Evan Berlin, Chief Executive Officer of EverHealth, said:
This launch reflects our commitment to delivering smarter, AI-powered solutions that focus on creating tangible provider and patient outcomes
That said, there was also an insider transaction worth noting. On March 7, 2026, it was reported that EverCommerce President Matthew David Feierstein sold 15,000 shares on March 4 and March 5 for a total of $181,169, at prices ranging from $12.0304 to $12.173 per share.
The filing showed that Feierstein sold 10,000 shares on March 4 and another 5,000 on March 5. It also said 4,352 shares were disposed of on March 5 to cover tax obligations, valued at $52,789 at $12.13 per share. After these transactions, Feierstein still directly owned 1,980,589 shares of EverCommerce stock and indirectly owned 150,000 shares through a family trust. The sales were executed under a prearranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on August 20, 2025, suggesting the transactions were scheduled in advance rather than made in response to a sudden company development. Even after the sales, Feierstein remained a significant shareholder in the company.
EverCommerce Inc. (NASDAQ:EVCM) is a service commerce platform that provides vertically tailored SaaS solutions to service-based businesses. The company says it serves more than 725,000 global service SMBs across categories, including home, health, and wellness.
6. Clearwater Analytics Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CWAN)
Clearwater Analytics Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CWAN) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
As of late February 2026, analysts covering Clearwater Analytics had a consensus Hold rating, with an average price target of about $26.17, a high target of $36.00, and a low target of $24.55. That implied roughly 11.7% upside from the stock’s then-current trading level.
On February 24, 2026, D.A. Davidson reiterated its Neutral rating on Clearwater Analytics and kept its price target at $24.55. The firm said fourth-quarter results came in modestly above both its own forecast and street expectations. D.A. Davidson also said it made only limited adjustments to its 2026 and 2027 forecasts, noted that management did not hold an earnings call or issue 2026 guidance because of the pending take-private transaction, and said it expected the merger proxy to be filed soon. The firm added that it expected the deal to close in April or May.
For context, in late December 2025, it was announced that Clearwater Analytics would be acquired by a private equity group led by Permira and Warburg Pincus for approximately $8.4 billion.
Clearwater Analytics Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CWAN) provides a cloud-native investment management platform for institutional investors across public and private markets, using a single-instance, multi-tenant architecture to deliver real-time data and AI-driven insights across the investment lifecycle.
5. Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM)
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 3, 2026, Akamai Technologies, Inc. announced that it would deploy thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to expand its global distributed cloud infrastructure. The company said the move is aimed at creating one of the world’s most widely distributed AI platforms, built for AI research and development, fine-tuning, post-training optimization, and inference workloads across its network.
Akamai said the platform is designed to reduce latency and data egress challenges associated with centralized data centers by routing inference workloads to optimized compute resources across its network. The company cited a MIT Technology Review figure saying 56% of organizations see latency as the main barrier to deploying AI at scale. Akamai said its distributed approach is intended to support use cases where fast response times matter, including physical and agentic AI applications.
The company said the deployment will support dedicated GPU clusters for inference, localized fine-tuning for privacy and regional compliance needs, and post-model training on proprietary data. Akamai also said its platform combines NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, and BlueField-3 DPUs with its cloud and edge network, which spans more than 4,400 locations worldwide.
Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKAM) is a cybersecurity, cloud computing, and content delivery company that helps businesses secure applications, protect data, and deliver digital experiences through its global network and distributed cloud platform.
4. DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DOCN)
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DOCN) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 3, 2026, DigitalOcean said Workato’s AI Research Lab is using its platform to support the development of next-generation enterprise AI agents at production scale. The company said Workato moved its AI Labs workloads to DigitalOcean’s inference-optimized cloud, which is powered by NVIDIA Hopper GPUs.
According to the announcement, Workato recorded immediate gains on frontier models, including Llama-3.3-70B, after the shift. DigitalOcean said inference costs fell 67% to $0.77 per 1 million tokens, throughput rose 67% to 13,561 tokens per second per GPU, and time-to-first-token improved 77% to 1,455 milliseconds at high load. The company also said time-to-value was reduced from weeks to days, representing more than a twofold acceleration.
DigitalOcean said it worked with Workato to design and tune a distributed inference architecture on DigitalOcean Kubernetes and configured NVIDIA Dynamo to coordinate workloads across interconnected GPU clusters. The company said this setup reduced redundant computation, improved responsiveness under heavy demand, and gave Workato a 33% hardware price-performance advantage.
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DOCN) is a cloud infrastructure provider focused on simplifying deployment for developers, startups, and businesses. The company said its platform combines GPU infrastructure and core cloud services to support AI and broader production workloads, and that it serves more than 640,000 customers.
3. PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS)
PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On February 27, 2026, D.A. Davidson raised its price target on PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) to $40 from $38 and maintained a Buy rating on the stock. The firm said it updated its model after management conversations about the company’s ongoing business model evolution and its expanding role in networking and scaled analytics across the semiconductor ecosystem. The note pointed to PDF Solutions’ growing position as an industry standard in those areas.
The rating followed the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 results reported on February 12, 2026. PDF Solutions posted revenue of $62.4 million, up 25% year over year, while diluted earnings per share came in at $0.30, ahead of consensus expectations cited in analyst coverage. The non-GAAP gross margin improved to 77% from 72% a year earlier. The company also said it expects 2026 revenue growth in line with its long-term 20% target.
PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) provides data, analytics, and software offerings that help semiconductor companies improve manufacturing yield, quality, and operational efficiency.
2. OneStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:OS)
OneStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:OS) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 6, 2026, BTIG downgraded OneStream to Neutral from Buy without a price target after the company agreed to be acquired (by PE firm Hg Capital) for $24 per share, with the transaction expected to close in the first half of 2026. The analyst said the pending takeover was the reason for the downgrade, not a change in the company’s underlying operating performance.
For context, OneStream reported fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $163.7 million, up 24% year over year, while subscription revenue rose 27% to $150.3 million. GAAP operating loss narrowed to $5.2 million from $47.4 million a year earlier, while non-GAAP operating income increased to $16.7 million from $8.7 million. Non-GAAP EPS improved to $0.12 from $0.07. For full-year 2025, revenue increased 23% to $601.9 million, and subscription revenue rose 28% to $550.0 million. CEO Tom Shea said 2025 showed strong momentum in Finance AI, with AI bookings and customers more than doubling during the year, while the company also expanded its strategic partnership with Microsoft. Because of the pending Hg acquisition, OneStream said it would not host a quarterly conference call or provide forward-looking guidance.
OneStream, Inc. (NASDAQ:OS) is an enterprise finance software company that provides a cloud platform for financial close, consolidation, reporting, planning, and forecasting. The company says its platform unifies financial and operational data and embeds AI tools to help modernize the Office of the CFO.
1. VNET Group, Inc (NASDAQ:VNET)
VNET Group, Inc (NASDAQ:VNET) is one of the best rising AI stocks to buy now.
On March 5, 2026, The Star, citing Bloomberg, reported that VNET had secured a record order from ByteDance to provide about 500 megawatts of data center capacity in China. According to the report, ByteDance is seeking more computing and storage capacity to support the growth of its flagship chatbot Doubao and other artificial intelligence technologies. No financial terms or other deal details were disclosed.
The reported order is large relative to VNET’s existing wholesale footprint. As of the end of September 2025, the company had 783 megawatts of wholesale capacity in service, with 582 megawatts already utilized by customers. The report also noted that VNET and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment. VNET’s customers include Tencent, JD.com, and Alibaba, while its net revenue in the July-September quarter rose about 22% year over year to 2.58 billion yuan, including 1.95 billion yuan from internet data center services.
VNET Group, Inc (NASDAQ:VNET) is a China-based carrier- and cloud-neutral internet data center services provider. The company provides hosting and related services, including IDC services, cloud services, and business VPN services, to support customers’ internet infrastructure.
While we acknowledge the potential of VNET to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than VNET and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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