Should You Forget Sandisk and Buy These 2 AI Stocks While They're Cheap?

Sandisk (NASDAQ: SNDK) was the best-performing stock within the Russell 1000 Index in the first quarter, with its share price surging 194%. The company benefited from a shortage in the NAND (flash) memory market, which helped drive up prices and led to huge revenue and earnings growth.

While the NAND market is being aided by the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure boom, it has historically been a very cyclical business. That's why it could be a better move to buy some other artificial intelligence stocks while they are cheap. Let's look at two that have much more durable and differentiated businesses: Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO).

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Nvidia: The AI chipmaker with a wide moat

While flash memory is a commodity business, Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) are complex logic chips surrounded by the strongest ecosystem in the semiconductor space. More than a decade of foundational AI code has been written on its proprietary CUDA software platform to optimize the performance of its chips for AI workloads, particularly large language model (LLM) training. This is then connected by its fast-growing networking portfolio.

Nvidia has been the market's premier growth stock over the past few years, and investors can pick up shares at a great valuation, with the stock trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just 21 times current fiscal year estimates and below 16 times based on next fiscal year's consensus.

Broadcom: The ASIC and networking leader

While Broadcom doesn't immediately screen as cheap, trading at 27.5 times current fiscal year analyst estimates, that multiple quickly drops to 17.5 times given the explosive growth the company is poised to deliver. The company is the market leader in two of the fastest-growing segments of the AI infrastructure market: networking and custom AI chips.

As the size of data centers grows and more chips need to work together in unison, the networking side of AI data centers only becomes more important. Broadcom is a stalwart in the space, led by its industry-leading Tomahawk Ethernet solution.

At the same time, the company is also at the forefront of ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) technology, where it helps turn customer chip designs into physical chips that can be manufactured at scale. Broadcom very much takes a platform approach that helps lock in customers, so this also feeds into its networking business. The success of Alphabet's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) has been a big feather in its cap and has also led to other hyperscalers turning to it to help them develop their own custom AI chips. AI ASICs are hardwired chips built for specific purposes and are well-suited for AI inference, given their strong power efficiency.

Long-term AI winners

While Sandisk is riding a nice near-term trend, both Nvidia and Broadcom are built for the long haul. That's why I prefer these two AI stocks for the long term. Pick them up while their valuations are cheap.

Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Broadcom. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.