Want $1 Million in Retirement? Invest $100,000 in These 3 Stocks and Wait a Decade

If you want to turn $100,000 into $1 million over the next decade, you're going to need around a 26% compound average annual return (CAGR) over the next 10 years. That's a pretty big return, but not one that's impossible to hit. By comparison, the S&P 500 index generated an average yearly return of 14.8% over the past decade, and the Nasdaq 100 had a 19.7% average annual gain over that same period.

Let's look at three stocks to buy that have the potential to help you reach this goal.

1. Broadcom

If you're shooting for outsized gains, you need to find stocks that have the opportunity to produce massive growth. One company with a huge growth opportunity in front of it is Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO). The company is a leader in the hot data center networking market, but its biggest opportunity is in helping customers create custom artificial intelligence (AI) chips.

Broadcom is a leader in ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) technology, where it provides the building blocks to turn chip designs into actual chips that can be produced at scale. It helped Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) produce its well-regarded tensor processing units (TPUs), and other companies, including OpenAI, have turned to it to help them design their own custom chips. Analysts at Citigroup have predicted that Broadcom's AI revenue could rise fivefold over the next two years. Meanwhile, those estimates don't even include any contribution from Apple, with whom the company has been reportedly working, as well.

2. Alphabet

Perhaps no company has as many shots on goal for outsized growth over the next decade as Alphabet. From AI to robotaxis to quantum computing, Alphabet is at the forefront of multiple technological shifts. The company also has the most complete AI stack of any company, with both a leading large language model (LLM) in Gemini and its world-class custom AI chips. This gives it a structural cost advantage with AI training and inference that filters into both its search/AI discovery and cloud computing businesses.

Alphabet also has huge distribution (through Chrome, Android, and a search-revenue sharing deal with Apple) and monetization (its massive global ad network) advantages that provide a wide moat as search and generative AI chatbots meld together. Meanwhile, the company's TPUs have become so highly regarded that customers are now starting to sign up to use the chips to power their own AI workloads. Analysts at Morgan Stanley predict that every 500,000 TPUs deployed through Google Cloud equates to around $13 billion in revenue. It expects Alphabet to deploy 5 million TPUs in 2027 and 7 million in 2028.

Image source: Getty Images.

3. UiPath

When shooting for an over 25% annual return, you're going to need a name that has the opportunity to give you a little more juice. UiPath (NYSE: PATH) is a stock that has the potential to do just that. It's a relatively cheap stock, trading at a forward price-to-sales multiple (P/S) of just above 4.5 and a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of around 20. However, it has a huge opportunity in front of it.

UiPath is a stalwart in the field of robot process automation (RPA). While that sounds fancy, it is simply using software bots to perform simple, rule-based tasks like data entry. As AI went mainstream, UiPath's business slowed as organizations pulled back to see where things were headed with AI. During this time, UiPath brought back its founder and used its RPA background, which requires a strong compliance and governance framework, to create an agentic AI orchestration platform.

Given the growth of AI agents from a wide array of vendors, having a system that manages and monitors them is becoming increasingly important. UiPath's Maestro platform can even assign the best tasks to both AI agents and software bots, helping customers save money by not having to use much more expensive AI agents for simple automation.

UiPath is just starting to see its revenue growth accelerate, but as agent sprawl becomes more of an issue in the coming years, the stock has huge potential long-term upside.

Citigroup is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet, Broadcom, and UiPath. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, and UiPath. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.