Cathie Wood Predicts That AI Will Create a $13 Trillion Software Opportunity. This Stock Could Be Unstoppable If She's Right.

Key Points

• Several stocks could be big winners if the AI software market takes off as much as Cathie Wood expects.

• One stands out, though, as the center of the AI software universe.

• Even if the AI software market doesn't hit $13 trillion, this stock should be a huge winner.

• 10 stocks we like better than Nvidia ›

It's no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting some businesses more than others. Software development is one of them. For example, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), said earlier this year that over 30% of Google's code had been generated by AI.

Cathie Wood and her team at Ark Invest think that we're only in the early stages of AI software development. Wood predicts that the AI software market will reach $13 trillion by 2030. I think one stock will be unstoppable if she's right.

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One stock stands above the rest

Actually, I suspect that several stocks will be unstoppable if the AI software market grows to $13 trillion over the next five years. Since I've already mentioned Alphabet, I'll start with it.

The company's Google Gemini Code Assist helps with creating software code and debugging with multiple programming languages. Google DeepThink would have won second place in the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Competition if large language models (LLMs) were allowed to win. OpenAI's GPT-5 would have taken first place.

Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) is another stock that I believe will be a huge winner if the AI software market explodes. The company's technology helps customers monitor their cloud applications and infrastructure. Since most AI software runs in the cloud, Datadog should be an obvious beneficiary if Wood's market prediction comes true.

However, I think one stock stands above the rest in profiting from a massive AI software market: Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Sure, Nvidia already ranks as the largest company in the world based on market cap. But if Wood is right, it's going to grow much bigger over the next few years.

The center of the AI universe

It's no exaggeration to say that Nvidia stands at the center of the AI universe. The company's GPUs remain the best at powering AI models.

I don't expect Nvidia to be knocked off its perch anytime soon. Yes, several others have developed chips that can be used in AI training and inference. However, none of them has been able to keep up with Nvidia. There's a reason why the company's newest Blackwell GPUs are practically flying off the shelves.

More importantly, Nvidia isn't slowing down its pace of innovation. The company recently announced its new Rubin CPX GPU that supports massive-context inference. This chip will enable AI models to process millions of tokens.

Rubin CPX will almost certainly be a significant milestone for video creation using generative AI. But I believe Nvidia's new GPU could be a game-changer for AI software development. Why? To support full-blown software development, AI models have to process and understand entire codebases. Today's infrastructure simply doesn't have the capacity to handle such massive context. Rubin CPX should enable AI to morph from simple coding assistance to advanced tools that can tackle large-scale software projects.

Granted, this new CPU won't be available until late next year. However, I fully expect that Nvidia won't just be at the center of the AI universe; it will be at the center of the AI software universe, too.

Will the AI software market really hit $13 trillion?

Wood and Ark Invest are significantly more bullish about how much the AI software market will grow over the next five years than most industry observers. For example, ABI Research projects the market will reach $467 billion by 2030. While that reflects a compound annual growth rate of around 25%, it's far short of $13 trillion.

Ark Invest's prediction assumes "rapid mass adoption" of AI in creating software, with "81% of current working time automated by 2030." That might be too optimistic, but I don't think it's out of the question.

Still, I'm not sure if the AI software market will really hit $13 trillion in only five years. Even if it doesn't, I don't doubt that AI will play a much more important role in software development by then than it does now. And I'm confident that Nvidia will be unstoppable regardless of what the AI software market size is by the end of the decade.

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Keith Speights has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Datadog, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Confluent and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.