This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is responsible for adding trillions of dollars in value to a handful of companies over the last few years. Nvidia, for example, briefly touched a $5 trillion market cap this year, thanks to its dominant position in the market for graphics processing units (GPUs). Four other companies sit firmly above the $2 trillion threshold as we approach the new year.
But three AI stocks currently have similar market caps around $1.6 trillion as of this writing, and are vying to become the first new $2 trillion company of 2026: Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO). Here's my prediction for the next company to top the milestone, and it could come as soon as next year.
Artificial intelligence is fueling all three
Meta, Tesla, and Broadcom have all seen their stock prices heavily influenced by advances in AI this year.
Meta stock climbed higher early in the year as its efforts to improve its recommendation algorithms bore fruit. Ad revenue climbed higher as time spent on its apps increased, and ads became more effective. However, the stock took a step back recently as management shared plans to increase its AI-related spending.
Tesla's value is heavily tied to its robotaxi service and AI innovations. The stock received a boost over the summer when it launched its robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas. Investors added to those gains on promising progress on the company's next-generation AI chip for its vehicles.
Broadcom's custom AI accelerator business has gained momentum in 2025, as the company signed big contracts with OpenAI and Anthropic, the latter of which is buying Alphabet's Broadcom-designed tensor processing units (TPUs). To that end, Alphabet and Broadcom are seeing excellent progress in shifting more developer workloads to TPUs, which offer greater energy efficiency and cost savings versus Nvidia's GPUs.
Broadcom stock took a step back after its last earnings report, as many analysts were disappointed with management's expectation that greater AI chip sales would come at a lower gross margin.
While all three of these stocks have a path to a $2 trillion valuation in 2026, I expect Meta Platforms to reach the milestone first. Here's why.
AI-powered earnings growth at an attractive valuation
Even with its run rate of $200 billion in annual revenue, Meta is still growing its bottom line quickly. Adjusted earnings per share climbed 20% in the third quarter, and improvements in AI are the reason.
Meta has seen an increase in both ad impressions and price per ad for eight straight quarters. That indicates that it's increasing user engagement and opening new places within its apps for advertising while making ads more effective.
Management attributes a shift in its recommendation algorithm to make it more general across formats as the primary reason users are spending more time on its apps. Meta has seen similar improvements by applying the same methodology to its advertising algorithm. In other words, bigger models have directly translated into more revenue.
That trend should continue in 2026, as Meta opens up more opportunities for advertising, including on Threads and WhatsApp. It could also begin monetizing Meta AI, its generative AI chatbot. The improvements in its algorithms over the last couple of years should enable it to ramp up advertising quickly without as much negative impact on its pricing as we've seen in the past.
The bigger opportunity for Meta in 2026, though, may be the expansion of its generative AI features. It's reportedly working on an AI agent that can manage advertising campaigns for small businesses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly talks about the opportunity to handle everything involved with creating, testing, and optimizing ad campaigns on its platform through an AI agent.
And chatbots specializing in sales and customer service for a company could open the door for more businesses to push Facebook and Instagram users to start messaging them through Meta's chat apps.
With small- and medium-sized businesses accounting for the bulk of advertisers on Meta's platform, these innovations have the potential to dramatically increase the amount they're willing to spend on ads. If the overhead for these clients is much lower, they can increase their ad spending and scale up their businesses faster.
Those efforts should fuel another year of strong revenue growth. And while depreciation expense from the increase in AI-related capital expenditures could eat into earnings growth, Meta should be able to manage continued improvements in earnings per share with the help of share repurchases.
The stock trades for just 26 times forward earnings expectations, which is much lower than Broadcom's multiple and less than one-tenth the multiple Tesla stock trades for. I expect Meta to fetch a higher earnings multiple as it proves its AI spending to be well worth it once again in 2026, pushing its valuation to $2 trillion.
This article was originally published on Fool.com. All figures quoted in US dollars unless otherwise stated.
