AI Stocks Surge Amid Market Volatility: Palantir, SoundHound, and UiPath Lead the Way

Why you should buy these 3 AI stocks right now

Retired educator and part-time yoga instructor Vicki Knight says she feels stretched thin. "I'm semi-retired." The Marietta, Georgia, resident says her Social Security income is not enough to live on and that a recent stock market selloff fueled by tariff uncertainty has complicated her plans. The U.S. equity market has experienced high volatility so far in 2025, driven by aggressive tariff policies, ongoing trade wars, rising interest rates, and shifting investor behaviors. Yet, this period has also presented opportunities to acquire reasonably priced, high-quality stocks. You do not need substantial funds to take advantage of the current environment. Just $200 - not kept aside for bills or emergency savings - can be invested in any of these artificial intelligence (AI)-powered stocks for at least the next five years. Palantir Palantir Technologies' (NASDAQ: PLTR) data mining and analytics platform helps unify, organize, and manage vast amounts of organizational data across various sources and formats to generate actionable insights. The company's earnings performance highlights the strong demand for its offerings. Palantir's first-quarter results were impressive, with revenue rising 39% year over year to $884 million. The company's U.S. revenue grew even faster, at 55% year over year, and now accounts for almost 71% of the total business. Notably, the U.S. commercial business has also crossed the $1 billion annual revenue run rate in the first quarter. Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has positioned the company as providing a major ontology (a digital framework that links an organization's digital and real-world assets) and AI-powered operating system for commercial enterprises and government agencies. Unlike other AI players that focus on developing advanced foundational models, Palantir primarily concentrates on AI implementations, translating the capabilities of large language models into business outcomes. AIP enables enterprise autonomy, helping clients build autonomous AI agents for various tasks. Customer adoption of the company's offerings has been strong. Walgreens Boots Alliance has automated nearly 384 billion daily decisions across 4,000 stores in eight months, while American International Group expects its five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to double after adopting Palantir's technology. Hence, despite trading at a very rich valuation of 208 times forward earnings, Palantir's implementation-focused AI strategy and strong customer demand present an exceptional long-term opportunity for retail investors. SoundHound AI SoundHound AI's (NASDAQ: SOUN) recent earnings performance has also been stellar. With revenue surging 151% year over year to $29.1 million, and none of its customers accounting for more than 10% of the total revenue, the company has built a high-growth and well-diversified business. SoundHound has created a sustainable competitive moat with its proprietary multimodal and multilingual Polaris foundation model, which supports 30 languages and delivers 4 times better latency, twice the sentence accuracy in noisy environments, and 35% better word error rates. Consequently, the company is well-positioned to capture share in the global voice and speech recognition market, estimated to grow from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $81.6 billion by 2030. Furthermore, SoundHound's strategic acquisitions of SYNQ3, Allset, and Amelia have expanded the company's reach to nearly 13,000 restaurants, while also opening new cross-selling opportunities across several verticals. The company has recently introduced a voice commerce ecosystem that integrates conversational AI capabilities in vehicles, enabling hands-free ordering from restaurants while driving. This feature has generated significant interest from automakers and could become a substantial revenue stream in the years to come. SoundHound's stock is down nearly 60% from its all-time high in December 2024. Coupled with multiple tailwinds, this discounted price appears to be the right time to buy this stock now. UiPath Shares of robotic process automation (RPA) player UiPath (NYSE: PATH) are currently down nearly 86% from their all-time high in May 2021. The company has suffered in the current uncertain macroeconomic environment, despite its strong fundamentals. In its recent earnings results (the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, ended Jan. 31), UiPath's revenue was slightly below analyst estimates, primarily due to the timing of deal closures in the government business. However, UiPath's strategic pivot toward agentic AI can prove to be a significant catalyst in the long run. Several of its agentic AI products, including Agent Builder, Agentic Orchestration, and Agentic Testing, are already seeing strong adoption trends. With Agent Builder, nearly 3,000 agents have been added to workflows to create mission-critical processes. Agentic Orchestration is helping orchestrate specialized agents, robots, and people to execute goal-based tasks. Agentic Testing is also helping software testers improve productivity with agents. This approach to combining AI agents with traditional RPA has been a key differentiator for the company. UiPath also boasts robust customer metrics, with a dollar-based gross retention rate of 98% and a dollar-based net retention rate of 110% in the fourth quarter. Additionally, while the total customer count remained flat year over year, high-value customers spending over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased by 10% year over year, and those spending $5 million or more increased by 30% in the fourth quarter. Finally, UiPath also has a robust balance sheet with $1.7 billion in cash and zero debt. Despite the many advantages, UiPath trades at only 4.6 times sales, significantly lower than its three-year average of 6.9 times. Hence, considering the multiple tailwinds and low valuation, the stock is a worthwhile investment, even though the company has experienced a slowdown in its growth trajectory over the past few quarters. Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies and UiPath. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY. Should you invest $1,000 in Palantir Technologies right now? Offer from the Motley Fool: Before you buy stock in Palantir Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now... and Palantir Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider whenNetflixmade this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation,you'd have $639,271!* Or when Nvidiamade this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation,you'd have $804,688!*

Billionaires Are Buying 2 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks That Wall Street Analysts Say Can Soar Up to 240% | The Motley Fool

Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investment bought 149,191 shares of Palantir, increasing his position 573%. He also added 13,729 shares of Upstart, increasing his stake 28%. Importantly, certain Wall Street analysts see tremendous returns ahead for shareholders. Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities expects Palantir to be a $1 trillion company within three years, which implies 240% upside from its current market value of $294 billion. And Dan Dolev at Mizuho Securities recently set Upstart with a target price of $85 per share, which implies 85% upside from its current share price of $46. In its earliest days, Palantir built bespoke data analytics solutions for the U.S. intelligence community. But the company now focuses on developing modular software platforms for customers across the commercial and government sectors. Its core products (Gotham and Foundry) let customers integrate complex information and extract nuanced insights with machine learning models and analytical tools. Importantly, in 2023, Palantir introduced an adjacent Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) that adds support for large language models and natural language processing. In other words, AIP lets organizations infuse their data analytics workflows with generative AI. Forrester Research recently recognized Palantir as a technology leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms. Palantir looked strong in the first quarter. Customer count increased 39% to 769, and the average spend per existing customer increased 24%. In turn, revenue rose 39% to $884 million, and non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) earnings jumped 62% to $0.13 per diluted share. Management attributed the strong performance to demand for its AI platform. Wall Street estimates Palantir's adjusted earnings will increase at 31% annually through 2026. That makes the current valuation of 270 times earnings look outrageously expensive. Investors can look at this stock in two ways: On one hand, I think Dan Ives is right in saying Palantir will be a trillion-dollar company eventually. On the other hand, I also believe the stock is due for a sharp correction. Patient investors comfortable with volatility can reconcile those opposing views by purchasing a very small position today. And if the stock drops sharply in the coming months, they can consider buying more shares at cheaper valuations. Upstart has developed a lending platform that leans on artificial intelligence to help banks and credit unions quantify credit risk more accurately than traditional credit scores. Its business benefits from a network effect in that every data point -- whenever a borrower makes or misses a payment -- makes its machine learning models more effective. Upstart reported solid financial results in the first quarter, beating expectations on the top and bottom lines. Loan originations more than doubled, revenue increased 67% to $2.1 billion, and non-GAAP net income was $0.30 per diluted share, up from a loss of $0.31 per diluted share in the same quarter last year. Nevertheless, Upstart stock crashed after the earnings report, likely because investors are worried about the lending environment. Tariffs imposed by the Trump administration threaten to slow economic growth, perhaps to the point of recession. That would be bad news for Upstart because banks are usually more conservative about extending credit during periods of economic upheaval. However, that creates an opportunity for patient investors. Wall Street expects adjusted earnings to grow at 195% annually through 2026, which makes the current valuation of 140 times earnings look reasonable. Even if the consensus is overly optimistic, Upstart still lets lenders approve more borrowers at lower rates, which should drive demand for its platform in the long run. Importantly, Upstart-powered loans originated in the last eight quarters have beat the two-year Treasury yield by an average of 8 percentage points. That very attractive return should bring more lenders to the platform and help the company capitalize on its $3 trillion addressable market. So, while shareholders may not see 85% returns in the next year, given the uncertain economic environment, I expect the stock to perform well over the next five years.

Is Palantir a Top AI Stock to Buy in June? | The Motley Fool

Palantir (PLTR 7.69%) has rapidly become one of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) stocks in the market. It's up by more than 600% since the start of 2024 and has gained more than 60% so far in 2025 alone. Few stocks will ever match that sort of jaw-dropping performance, but now, many investors are wondering if it's too late to buy Palantir. I think there's one guiding metric that will inform investors whether it is or not, and the answer may surprise you. Palantir provides its clients with an AI-powered data analytics software suite. While the ins and outs of what Palantir does are quite complicated, its platform can simply be described as data in, insights out. This basic concept isn't easy in practice, but it has earned Palantir a broad and growing customer base. Palantir's got its start assisting various governments around the world -- and such clients are still its most important customers. It has since then expanded into commercial markets and has seen success in that arena, particularly in the U.S. In Q1, Palantir's fastest growing segment was U.S. commercial, which saw revenue rise by 71% to $255 million. Its U.S. government accounts also saw significant growth, with revenue increasing by 45% to $373 million. One area where Palantir is lagging is global sales. This may not necessarily be Palantir's fault, as AI hasn't been as widely adopted as quickly by businesses worldwide (if you exclude China). Its total commercial sales were up 33% to $397 million in Q1, while total government sales increased by 45% to $487 million. Overall, it's still a rapidly growing business, and if its domestic revenues continue growing at the same pace they have been, Palantir will be just fine. To top it off, in conjunction with its Q1 report, Palantir's management team gave guidance for a strong Q2 -- it expects revenue to rise by 38% year over year. However, Palantir's management has a history of guiding low and then overdelivering, so investors shouldn't be too concerned that Q2's forecast growth rate is slower than Q1's 39%. All of these metrics point to Palantir as still being a successful investment, but there's one problem: the price tag. As mentioned above, Palantir's stock is up by more than 600% since 2024 began, yet its revenue has only risen by 40% and net income is up 172%. In short, the market is willing to pay more for Palantir's stock than it did in 2024. This occurred by a mechanism known as multiple expansion. Palantir's stock now trades at jaw-dropping valuations. Few stocks reach and sustain levels of 212 times forward earnings and nearly 100 times sales. Palantir's execution from here will have to be flawless and outperform expectations, or else the stock will get whacked. To illustrate how expensive Palantir's stock is, let's take a five-year outlook and assume that Palantir's profit margin improves to 30%, its growth rate stays at 40%, and its share count stays flat. Those are incredibly bullish projections, but we're giving Palantir the benefit of the doubt. Should those three things occur, in five years, Palantir will produce $16.8 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profits. That would be incredible growth, but if the stock simply stayed flat from now until then, it would be trading for 58 times earnings at that point, which is still quite expensive. There are so many better options out there for investors than Palantir. The company is growing like few others, but the price you'd have to pay for the stock today already has at least five years of incredible growth baked in. As a result, I think many other stocks will outperform Palantir over the next five years.

Better Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock: Palantir vs. Snowflake | The Motley Fool

Technology stocks have been under pressure this year due to the tariff-fueled turmoil, as evident from the flat performance of the Nasdaq Composite so far in 2025 (it was down as much as 24% at one point). But shares of Palantir Technologies (PLTR 7.69%) and Snowflake (SNOW 1.75%) have defied the sell-off and have clocked impressive gains. Palantir stock has shot up 63% this year despite bouts of volatility. Snowflake stock has jumped close to 32%, aided by a solid set of results recently. Their efforts related to artificial intelligence (AI) are a common factor driving the gains of both companies. While both stocks are doing well, if you are looking to add just one of these two AI stocks to your portfolio right now, which one should it be? Let's find out. Palantir Technologies helps commercial and government clients integrate generative AI capabilities into their operations with its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which was launched roughly two years ago. This platform has turned out to be a hit among customers because of the productivity and efficiency gains it delivers, reducing operational costs. According to various third-party assessments, Palantir is considered to be the leading provider of AI software platforms, which are a collection of infrastructure and tools that are needed to develop, train, deploy, and manage AI applications. The market seems to agree: The release of AIP has led to a sharp acceleration in the company's growth. Revenue in the first quarter of 2023 (just before it launched its AIP), increased by 18% from the year-ago quarter. That jumped significantly to 39% year over year in the first quarter of 2025, a clear indication that the company is capitalizing on the fast-growing market for AI software platforms. Its rapidly improving revenue pipeline indicates that its growth is likely to pick up its pace. The software specialist's remaining deal value (RDV), which refers to the total value of contracts that it is yet to fulfill, increased 45% from the year-ago period to $6 billion. With RDV growth outpacing the increase in its top line, it suggests that the company is landing more contracts than it is fulfilling. With this signal for even stronger growth in the future, the company bumped up its annual guidance as well. Moreover, Palantir's earnings are increasing faster than its revenue due to the company's favorable unit economics. Customers have shown a tendency to expand their adoption of the business's services. This explains the year-over-year increase of 8 percentage points in its adjusted operating margin in the previous quarter, which eventually led to a 62% spike in its earnings. With the market for AI software platforms forecast to generate annual revenue of $153 billion in 2028, according to data analytics specialist IDC, there is a solid chance Palantir will keep growing at elevated levels thanks to AI. Snowflake originally designed its data cloud platform to help customers securely store, consolidate, and access their data in a single source. The company wisely transitioned to allow them to build and deploy AI models and applications using their stored data. Snowflake has been investing in graphics processing units (GPUs) from chipmakers to run popular AI models, with which its customers can build AI agents, AI assistants, document processing apps, and other types of applications. This business model lets customers use its AI infrastructure and software stack on a pay-as-you-go basis, eliminating the costs of buying expensive GPUs and managing that infrastructure. Snowflake's AI offerings allow clients to unlock more value from the data they have stored on its platform. Almost 45% of its customers are already using its AI tools. Customer count increased by 19% year over year in the first quarter. And the pool of customers that could deploy its AI solutions is likely to keep growing in the long run, suggesting that there is a solid possibility of an acceleration in the company's growth. Product revenue in the first quarter increased 26% from the year-ago period, while its remaining performance obligations grew much faster at 34% to $6.7 billion, thanks to an increase in spending by existing customers as well as the addition of new customers. The $342 billion addressable market that Snowflake sees for its data cloud platform by 2028 indicates that it has tremendous room for growth, and AI could help it corner a chunk of that market. So, like Palantir, Snowflake is poised to benefit from the secular growth in cloud-based AI services. But will it be able to deliver more upside than its rival? We see that both Palantir and Snowflake are registering healthy growth rates, and they could do better in the future as their revenue pipelines improve because of AI. However, Palantir's revenue is growing at a faster pace than Snowflake's, while the latter's bottom-line growth of 71% was better than Palantir's. The big factor that separates both companies is their valuation. Snowflake's stock is significantly cheaper than Palantir's. Both companies have expensive valuations, but their growth and prospects justify that. So the choice between the two comes down to investors' risk tolerance. Those who can accept more risk and are willing to endure volatility can consider Palantir, while Snowflake's relatively cheaper valuation means it could be ideal for investors who are looking for a fast-growing company but aren't willing to pay Palantir's multiples.

3 Brilliant Stocks to Buy With $200 and Hold for 5 Years | The Motley Fool

The U.S. equity market has experienced high volatility so far in 2025, driven by aggressive tariff policies, ongoing trade wars, rising interest rates, and shifting investor behaviors. Yet, this period has also presented opportunities to acquire reasonably priced, high-quality stocks. You do not need substantial funds to take advantage of the current environment. Just $200 -- not kept aside for bills or emergency savings -- can be invested in any of these artificial intelligence (AI)-powered stocks for at least the next five years. Palantir Technologies' (PLTR 0.97%) data mining and analytics platform helps unify, organize, and manage vast amounts of organizational data across various sources and formats to generate actionable insights. The company's earnings performance highlights the strong demand for its offerings. Palantir's first-quarter results were impressive, with revenue rising 39% year over year to $884 million. The company's U.S. revenue grew even faster, at 55% year over year, and now accounts for almost 71% of the total business. Notably, the U.S. commercial business has also crossed the $1 billion annual revenue run rate in the first quarter. Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has positioned the company as providing a major ontology (a digital framework that links an organization's digital and real-world assets) and AI-powered operating system for commercial enterprises and government agencies. Unlike other AI players that focus on developing advanced foundational models, Palantir primarily concentrates on AI implementations, translating the capabilities of large language models into business outcomes. AIP enables enterprise autonomy, helping clients build autonomous AI agents for various tasks. Customer adoption of the company's offerings has been strong. Walgreens Boots Alliance has automated nearly 384 billion daily decisions across 4,000 stores in eight months, while American International Group expects its five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to double after adopting Palantir's technology. Hence, despite trading at a very rich valuation of 208 times forward earnings, Palantir's implementation-focused AI strategy and strong customer demand present an exceptional long-term opportunity for retail investors. SoundHound AI's (SOUN 0.42%) recent earnings performance has also been stellar. With revenue surging 151% year over year to $29.1 million, and none of its customers accounting for more than 10% of the total revenue, the company has built a high-growth and well-diversified business. SoundHound has created a sustainable competitive moat with its proprietary multimodal and multilingual Polaris foundation model, which supports 30 languages and delivers 4 times better latency, twice the sentence accuracy in noisy environments, and 35% better word error rates. Consequently, the company is well-positioned to capture share in the global voice and speech recognition market, estimated to grow from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $81.6 billion by 2030. Furthermore, SoundHound's strategic acquisitions of SYNQ3, Allset, and Amelia have expanded the company's reach to nearly 13,000 restaurants, while also opening new cross-selling opportunities across several verticals. The company has recently introduced a voice commerce ecosystem that integrates conversational AI capabilities in vehicles, enabling hands-free ordering from restaurants while driving. This feature has generated significant interest from automakers and could become a substantial revenue stream in the years to come. SoundHound's stock is down nearly 60% from its all-time high in December 2024. Coupled with multiple tailwinds, this discounted price appears to be the right time to buy this stock now. Shares of robotic process automation (RPA) player UiPath (PATH 0.49%) are currently down nearly 86% from their all-time high in May 2021. The company has suffered in the current uncertain macroeconomic environment, despite its strong fundamentals. In its recent earnings results (the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, ended Jan. 31), UiPath's revenue was slightly below analyst estimates, primarily due to the timing of deal closures in the government business. However, UiPath's strategic pivot toward agentic AI can prove to be a significant catalyst in the long run. Several of its agentic AI products, including Agent Builder, Agentic Orchestration, and Agentic Testing, are already seeing strong adoption trends. With Agent Builder, nearly 3,000 agents have been added to workflows to create mission-critical processes. Agentic Orchestration is helping orchestrate specialized agents, robots, and people to execute goal-based tasks. Agentic Testing is also helping software testers improve productivity with agents. This approach to combining AI agents with traditional RPA has been a key differentiator for the company. UiPath also boasts robust customer metrics, with a dollar-based gross retention rate of 98% and a dollar-based net retention rate of 110% in the fourth quarter. Additionally, while the total customer count remained flat year over year, high-value customers spending over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased by 10% year over year, and those spending $5 million or more increased by 30% in the fourth quarter. Finally, UiPath also has a robust balance sheet with $1.7 billion in cash and zero debt. Despite the many advantages, UiPath trades at only 4.6 times sales, significantly lower than its three-year average of 6.9 times. Hence, considering the multiple tailwinds and low valuation, the stock is a worthwhile investment, even though the company has experienced a slowdown in its growth trajectory over the past few quarters.