Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Creating the Next Generation of Trillion-Dollar Stocks?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a huge stock market trend -- an obvious statement, I know. But it can be a difficult trend to really quantify with hard numbers. However, the best evidence I can offer for the value of AI is the trillion-dollar companies that have risen (and will likely continue to rise) on the back of the AI trend.

Nvidia is probably the most famous trillion-dollar AI company. It broke the $1 trillion valuation in 2023 as companies clamored to buy its GPU chips to run AI programs. It's currently the most valuable company in the world, sitting at a market cap of $4.39 trillion.

So the question is less "Is AI creating the next generation of trillion-dollar stocks?" and more "Which companies are the next trillion-dollar companies that could be created by AI?"

Image source: Getty Images.

South Korea's tech giant

Of the three companies we'll discuss here, Samsung (OTC: SSNL.F) is the closest to the trillion-dollar mark with a current market cap of $772.8 billion. The company is up 217% in the last 12 months.

AI needs more than just GPUs to work, it also needs random access memory (RAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) to remember its training data and draw inferences from it.

That memory demand saw Samsung's fourth-quarter 2025 operating profit nearly triple over Q4 2024. And that's a trend Samsung is set to ride for some time to come as RAM prices are expected to rise as much as 50% or more over Q4 2025 in Q1 2026.

There are no guarantees of course, but Samsung is the closest tech company to joining the trillion-dollar club.

Don't forget to remember

Idaho-based Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) is the furthest of these three from the trillion-dollar mark, valued at $469.5 billion. But it's also poised to capitalize on the memory shortage in the same way Samsung is.

The company is up 373% over the past 12 months and in its first quarter of its fiscal 2026 (ended Nov. 27, 2025) its revenue was up 57% year over year. And the company's net income surged 180% year over year in that same quarter. Not as big a jump as Samsung, but impressive nonetheless.

Micron has further to go than Samsung but it's capitalizing on the same opportunity and the potential is there.

Going Dutch

ASML (NASDAQ: ASML) has been getting more attention lately but that's for a good reason. The company effectively has a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines needed to produce advanced semiconductors.

At present it has a market cap of $542 billion so it's also much further from $1 trillion than Samsung, but it has also been on a steady if less explosive growth trajectory than Samsung or Micron.

For ASML's full-year 2025 results, revenue climbed 20.6% over 2024 and its net income grew 32.4% over the same period. Demand is not slowing down either, because ASML saw its orders for new lithography machines grow 48% from 18.89 million in 2024 to 28 million in 2025.

Like Micron, ASML has a long way to go to enter the trillion-dollar club but as the world's only provider of EUV lithography machines it also has the potential to break the $1 trillion mark.

James Hires has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends ASML, Micron Technology, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.