Beyond Nvidia: 20 AI stocks we've picked to ride the next wave

Remember FANG? Back in 2013, Jim Cramer coined it for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. By 2017 it had grown an extra "A" for Apple, becoming FAANG. Then in 2023, Bank of America's Michael Hartnett borrowed the title of a classic Western to christen the "Magnificent Seven" — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — the handful of tech names single-handedly hauling the S&P 500 higher.

Now there's a new acronym on the block, and it has a distinctly summery flavor: MANGOS — Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX. Unlike its predecessors, this lineup includes two companies that aren't even public yet, marking a shift from social-media-and-cloud dominance to a market increasingly defined by frontier AI labs and infrastructure giants preparing to go public.

So — is this a bubble? The numbers say not quite. The Nasdaq 100's forward price-to-earnings ratio sits around 27x, well below its five-year average of roughly 32x. Take Micron: profits surged 15-fold, margins are pushing 90%, and the stock is up around 720% over the past year — yet its P/E has actually fallen, from a historical 57x to about 27x. Earnings are growing faster than the share price.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs argue this cycle looks nothing like the dot-com crash, since today's rally is driven by genuine profit growth rather than pure multiple expansion. The real risk, they suggest, isn't a 2000-style collapse — it's that the market may be overestimating how long these extraordinary capex-fueled profits can last.

Nvidia tells a similar story: its share price has risen more than 13-fold since 2023, but expected earnings per share have grown over 25-fold in the same stretch, meaning its forward P/E has actually compressed by nearly half.

Still, plenty of strategists warn the trade has become crowded — no recession required to trigger a pullback, just one disappointing earnings call. And with SpaceX's record-breaking IPO already swinging wildly, and Anthropic, OpenAI and Bending Spoons reportedly eyeing their own listings, caution is the watchword: IPO day tends to favor sellers, not buyers. The real test comes later — at the first earnings report and the lockup expiry.

With that backdrop in mind, here are the 20 AI stocks worth keeping on your radar right now.