The Smartest Growth Stock to Buy With $1,000 Right Now

Most investors would probably agree that artificial intelligence (AI) stocks remain the market's best bet for growth. But there's also no denying that leading AI stock Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has lost a bit of its shine, while the AI infrastructure arena's getting a bit crowded.

What's the next big thing in AI? It's arguably the improvement of data center interconnectivity equipment. See, one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks right now is connecting all the racks and racks of processors within an AI data center into a single neural network. It requires ultra-fast technology.

A company called Astera Labs (NASDAQ: ALAB) quietly supplies it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Next-generation AI data center technology

It's not the only name in the business, to be clear. For instance, Astera competes with much bigger Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO). What this $30 billion company lacks in size, however, it more than makes up for in agility, creativity, and ingenuity.

Case in point: Astera's Scorpio smart "fabric" switches. These are the market's first PCIe 6 fabric switch, purpose-built for scaling up existing artificial intelligence data centers. They're unique in that they're software-defined, making them flexible enough to interconnect a wide range of GPUs to other GPUs, but also accelerating their connections to SSDs, network interface cards, and other components found within a data center rack. It can also connect older and newer components.

It's not just hardware, though. Astera provides complete data center management systems, by also offering the software that makes the most of a data center's physical tech. Its COnnectivity System Management and Optimization Software -- or COSMOS, for short -- allows operators to monitor the performance of every link between two pieces of hardware. It can even predict when a physical component's failure is likely, and reroute data flow around this hardware as needed.

The real proof of Astera Labs' potential, however, is in its past, present, and future results. The company reported full-year revenue growth of $852.5 million for 2025, up 115% year over year. That's a tough act to follow, but the company's still doing pretty well. It's calling for top-line growth in the ballpark of $290 million, up 83% from a year earlier. Analysts, meanwhile, expect revenue growth of nearly 29% for the entirety of 2026.

It's all, of course, a testament to the ever-growing demand for artificial intelligence data center interconnectivity solutions ... a business Mordor Intelligence expects to grow by nearly 15% per year through 2032, when it will be worth more than $40 billion.

That figure may understate the true potential of high-performance switching solutions like Astera's, though. Dell'Oro Group says the number could be closer to $100 billion. As Dell'Oro Group VP Sameh Boujelbene explained in a statement: "To meet this explosive demand for compute, we can no longer rely solely on scale-out networks to provide GPU-to-GPU connectivity across racks. This shift is driving the rise of scale-up fabrics that tightly couple GPUs and memory within a shared high-bandwidth environment, enabling the distributed reasoning."

If that sounds a lot like the scale-up solutions Astera Labs offers, that's because it is.

Opportunity knocks

Do know that this stock ebbs and flows rather wildly; that's just the nature of the beast for any outfit this closely tethered to the AI revolution. In fact, it stumbled following the recent release of its fourth-quarter earnings, even though earnings topped analysts' estimates. Guidance wasn't exactly shabby either.

For investors who can keep the bigger picture in mind, however, these setbacks are great long-term buying opportunities.

James Brumley has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Astera Labs and Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.