In this article, we explore the 11 Best AI Penny Stocks to Buy Right Now.

Funds Society, a media platform and meeting point for wealth and asset management professionals, published a report on February 10, 2026, in which it noted that major cloud providers and OpenAI have earmarked more than $1.6 trillion for artificial-intelligence infrastructure between 2025 and 2028. The report, dubbed “AI in 2026”, added that the investments are already improving digital advertising, e-commerce, and cloud services.

Interestingly, Funds Society is not alone in pointing out this huge build-out scale. On February 3, Gartner stated that it expects worldwide IT spending in 2026 to increase by 10.8%, touching $6.15 trillion. Of particular interest is what John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, said. He stated that a huge chunk of the IT spending will be AI-adjacent. That is, a lot of the money will be spent on a sector that links to AI in one way or another. For example, Gartner anticipates server spending to grow 36.9% year over year, and total data center spending to increase 31.7% past $650 billion.

Despite these humongous spending figures, the Wall Street Journal noted in a February 9 report that “investors aren’t exactly thrilled.” Of all the big spenders, the Journal noted, only Meta’s stock rose after its Q4 FY2025 earnings release. Others saw their shares’ value plunge as deep as 14%. According to the Journal, investors are worried about the overall outlook for AI, punishing the tech giants for it.

This explains why some think that those who are willing to look beyond the mega caps may find opportunities. These opportunities may lie in smaller AI-focused companies, some of them with early-stage innovations that could offer the next breakout stock. This article will highlight some of the AI penny stocks that warrant investor attention.

Our Methodology

To create this list, we analyzed financial media reports and online rankings, and used stock screeners to identify artificial-intelligence companies. We then filtered for stocks trading at or below $5 as of February 11, 2026. We then shortlisted the 11 best names by looking at their upside potential and selected the stocks with the highest upside. We also considered institutional conviction based on hedge fund holdings as of Q3 2025. The stocks are ranked from the lowest to the highest upside potential.

Note: The stock’s price and upside potential data are as of February 11, 2026.

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 427.7% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 264 percentage points (see more details here).

Best AI Penny Stocks to Buy Right Now

11. Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 11

Stock Price: $3.39

Upside Potential: 138.81%

Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI) is one of the best AI penny stocks to buy right now. On February 11, Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI) announced its aiWARE platform and Data Refinery will support the AI agent economy by processing unstructured audio and video data, enforcing governance, and creating AI-ready assets.

aiWARE orchestrates multiple AI engines with policy-based controls and audit logs, while Data Refinery enriches raw content with rights and provenance information. Used in regulated environments, including work with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Veritone’s tools serve industries such as media, entertainment, public sector, and talent acquisition.

On January 29, Veritone, Inc. announced that its Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) processed 22.2 trillion tokens during the second half of 2025. This performance points to a more than 3.5x increase in volume compared with the first half of the year, the company said. The VDR platform that helps customers convert unstructured data into AI-ready assets.

According to Veritone, the milestone is evidence of a high adoption rate of VDR. These organizations use the platform to index and format large datasets such as text, media, and logs into tokens that can be used to train and refine AI models. Veritone said the growth in data processing volume signals increasing demand for premium, licensed data from sectors including media, entertainment, and production. In these spaces, the company stated, high-quality and proprietary data is becoming more valuable for AI training.

The company noted the broader market opportunity for data monetization. It cited research that expects the AI training dataset market to expand from about $7.48 billion in 2026 to over $52 billion within the next decade. The research stated that the growth will be driven by enterprise needs for licensed and ethical data sources.

Separately, on January 14, Veritone said its platform is positioned to support the Department of War’s newly released AI-First, modular, open-architecture strategy. The department issued the strategy in a January 9 memo for senior Pentagon leadership.

In the memo, the Department of War called for accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence across operations. It emphasized “AI-First” processes, modular systems, and open architectures that enable interoperability, rapid experimentation, and component replacement without vendor lock-in.

In this regard, Veritone stated that the design principles of its aiWARE platform align to this strategy. This enables organizations to orchestrate disparate AI models, data sources, and workflows.

Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI) is an enterprise artificial intelligence company best known for its aiWARE operating system. The platform orchestrates AI models to process and analyze unstructured data. Its AI solutions are applied across industries including media and entertainment, government, legal, and compliance.

10. ZenaTech, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZENA)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 1

Stock Price: $2.94

Upside Potential: 152.71%

ZenaTech, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZENA) is one of the best AI penny stocks to buy right now. On February 10, ZenaTech, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZENA) said it has integrated drone technology into its land surveying services. This integration, said ZenaTech, specifically targets national homebuilders, and that it leverages the company’s Drone as a Service (DaaS) platform to dramatically accelerate permit-ready survey delivery.

According to ZenaTech, the initiative addresses the issue of survey turnaround times, which has been a critical bottleneck in residential construction for quite some time. Typical survey turnaround times take up to 10 days, the company said. However, with the new initiative, ZenaTech aims to deliver completed permit-ready survey data in three days or less.

ZenaTech will enable this expansion through Cardinal Civil Resources, a land surveying firm acquired in 2025. The DaaS builder service offerings cover several surveying tasks, including topography, plot plans, boundary validation, zoning compliance, and jurisdiction-specific formatting.

Meanwhile, on February 3, ZenaTech said it had signed an offer to acquire a Virginia-based land surveying company. The company has an established customer base in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

ZenaTech stated that the acquisition, when completed, will strengthen its DaaS footprint in the Washington, D.C. metro region. As a result, the company plans to expand opportunities to offer its DaaS solutions to federal, state and municipal government agencies.

ZenaTech, Inc. (NASDAQ:ZENA) is a Canada-based technology company specializing in artificial intelligence-powered drones, enterprise SaaS platforms, and quantum computing solutions. Its AI-driven drone technology underpins its DaaS model, which supports applications in defense, land surveying, and public safety.