The Best Stocks to Invest $5,000 in Right Now

If you've got $5,000 available to invest that isn't needed to bolster an emergency fund or pay down short-term debt, and are looking to get into the market, I would start by investing in two leading artificial intelligence (AI) stocks. Let's look at two great options you can buy right now and hold for the long term.

Nvidia

The king of AI infrastructure, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), is not sitting still waiting for its crown to be usurped. The company has grown to be the largest in the world on the back of its graphics processing units (GPUs), and it is still seeing rapid revenue growth. Its CUDA software platform has been a differentiator and created a wide moat, but it knows that this may no longer be enough by itself as the market shifts more toward inference and agentic AI.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Through its acquisition of Groq and SchedMd, Nvidia has really positioned itself to be a leader in these two fields and expand on its ecosystem advantages. We can already see this with its introduction of NemoClaw, which utilizes SchedMD's Slurm, to create a powerful agentic AI platform, and by integrating Groq's inference-focused LPUs (language processing units) into its chip and software platform.

Nvidia is no longer just a chip company; it's become an end-to-end AI data center behemoth with one of the most complete tech stacks out there. That makes it a solid long-term investment.

Alphabet

In the AI revolution, it's becoming more and more about controlling the ecosystem. Nvidia is doing that on one end, while Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) is attacking it on the other end. Alphabet has the most complete AI stack at the moment, as it is the only company with world-class AI chips, with its tensor processing units (TPUs) plus a top-tier AI model in Gemini.

Alphabet's biggest advantage is its TPUs, which were developed more than a decade ago and which it has long used to power much of its internal workloads. These chips help Alphabet be one of the few companies not beholden to Nvidia, which ultimately gives it a huge cost advantage. By using its own chips, it can train its models and run inference much more cost-effectively than competitors who primarily use GPUs.

Meanwhile, that advantage just increases as spending on AI infrastructure rises. This creates a powerful flywheel effect that positions Alphabet to be a long-term AI leader.

At the same time, Alphabet can use its distribution edge (through Chrome, Android, and its deals with Apple) and expansive ad network to better monetize AI models than competitors, as well. Throw in its huge cloud computing growth that also benefits from the company having its own AI chips and a foundational large language model (LLM), and Alphabet is a top AI stock to own moving forward.

Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, and Nvidia and is short shares of Apple. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.