5 Stocks Winning the AI Race While Everyone Watches NVIDIA

Summary

The biggest growth stories in the market right now aren't happening with the chip makers. They're happening one layer beneath them. Keith Kaplan, CEO of TradeSmith, has spent recent months mapping what he calls the "choke points" of the AI build-out—the physical bottlenecks where trillion-dollar demand is running into a world that can't supply fast enough. His argument: the largest fortunes of this AI cycle won't go to the visible players. They'll go to the companies that those players can't function without. Get Micron Technology alerts:Sign UpThe $700 Billion ProblemBy the end of 2025, the four largest U.S. hyperscalers—Microsoft NASDAQ: MSFT, Alphabet NASDAQ: GOOGL, Amazon NASDAQ: AMZN, and Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META—are expected to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure. That number climbs toward $1 trillion by 2027 and, according to projections shared by NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA during its most recent earnings call, could reach $3 to $4 trillion in total economic impact within three to five years. That money isn't going into software. It's going into football-field-sized buildings, gigawatt-scale power systems, and transmission lines that don't exist yet. Think of it as demand being squeezed through a very narrow pipe: no matter how much water is upstream, the flow is whatever the choke point allows. Kaplan identifies five of those choke points, and a stock for each. Memory: The Chip Inside the ChipHigh-bandwidth memory (HBM) is what allows a GPU to actually function. Micron Technology TodayMUMicron Technology$860.31 +109.31 (+14.56%) As of 10:15 AM Eastern52-Week Range$92.22▼$862.40Dividend Yield0.07%P/E Ratio40.62Price Target$518.47 Without it, AI chips don't work. Micron Technology NASDAQ: MU is the only American producer of HBM, and its output for 2025 was completely sold out before the year began. Capacity for 2026 is already largely committed. As NVIDIA transitions its Rubin chips from HBM3E to HBM4, Micron's position in the supply chain only stren...