2 AI Stocks That Didn't Get the Memo That the Bull Market Hit a Speed Bump

While the market has pulled back from its all-time highs in 2026 over concerns about the broader economy, not all stocks have gotten the memo. In the tech sector, there are at least two artificial intelligence (AI) stocks still trading near their highs.

Let's take a closer look at these two stocks that apparently didn't get the memo to pull back in this uncertain economy.

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1. Palantir Technologies

Given its role in the defense and intelligence segments of the U.S. government, perhaps it should be no surprise that the stock of Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has rallied to trade near all-time highs, given the current U.S. conflict with Iran. The U.S. government is the company's largest customer, and Palantir is arguably its most important vendor in helping modernize its systems.

However, Palantir is far more than just a government defense contractor. The company's largest area of growth has come from the U.S. commercial sector, as its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has become one of the most important layers in implementing AI. Its platform is able to gather data from a variety of sources and then organize it into an ontology, which it then links to physical assets and workflow processes. This gives AI models the clean, structured data that they need to help avoid costly hallucinations (data that is inaccurate or doesn't make sense), in essence making Palantir's platform an AI operating system.

AIP can be used across industries to help customers solve a wealth of problems, which has led the company to see accelerating revenue growth over the past 10 quarters. This was topped off with a 70% increase last quarter.

That said, the stock is very expensive, trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of 51 times. I think Palantir can eventually grow into this multiple, but I'm not chasing the stock up at these levels.

2. Sandisk

Another tech stock trading near all-time highs is Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK). The stock has been on fire since it was spun off from Western Digital early last year, making its triumphant return to the public markets as a stand-alone company.

The company is the only pure-play way to invest in the hot NAND (flash) memory market, which has seen prices skyrocket due to current supply constraints in the market. After the market became oversupplied due to a pull-forward in electronics demand stemming from the pandemic, most big memory makers cut NAND production, which has not returned.

Instead, these companies are now focused on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a special form of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) that AI chips are required to be packaged with for optimal performance. Meanwhile, NAND has also seen demand skyrocket due to the need for massive, high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) that use flash memory to store training data.

Sandisk's stock is cheap, trading at a forward P/E of 8 times fiscal 2027 analyst estimates. NAND is a notoriously cyclical business, but if high-bandwidth flash (HBF), a new technology it developed with SK Hynix to address AI inference, takes off, the stock could still have strong upside. Still, I think the stock falls a bit more into the speculative category at this point.

Geoffrey Seiler has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies and Western Digital. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.