Two Shares to Buy in 2026: AI Leaders Positioned for Explosive Growth

The beginning of 2026 is already demonstrating why technology investors remain bullish about shares to buy in the artificial intelligence sector. The Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector index has climbed 3.4% in early 2026, significantly outpacing the broader S&P 500’s 0.3% advance. This early momentum reflects growing confidence that AI infrastructure investment will continue to drive substantial market gains throughout the year. Goldman Sachs has publicly stated that the S&P 500 could experience double-digit returns in 2026, with accelerating AI adoption and infrastructure spending being key catalysts for this optimistic outlook.

Within this expanding landscape, two technology companies are emerging as compelling opportunities for investors seeking shares to buy before the next major market expansion. Both firms benefit from robust revenue pipelines and demonstrate the ability to capitalize on different dimensions of the AI revolution—one through infrastructure provisioning and the other through enterprise productivity solutions.

CoreWeave: Building the Foundation of AI Infrastructure Growth

CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) has already surged 29% since the start of 2026, providing substantial relief to shareholders following a period of weakness in the second half of 2025. The neocloud specialist’s initial pullback occurred amid broader concerns regarding whether AI expenditure growth could be sustained and questions about circular financing arrangements within the sector. However, subsequent quarterly results have definitively demonstrated the company’s resilience and growth trajectory.

The company specializes in operating dedicated AI data centers powered by graphics processing units (GPUs)—specialized hardware essential for hyperscalers, enterprises, and AI laboratories to execute cloud-based artificial intelligence workloads. CoreWeave’s customers rent compute capacity, storage, and networking infrastructure through its platform, creating a highly efficient recurring revenue model that has proven exceptionally attractive to the market.

The numbers tell a compelling story about CoreWeave’s operational momentum. Revenue more than tripled during the first nine months of 2025, reaching $3.56 billion. Perhaps most significantly, the company’s backlog of confirmed customer contracts expanded dramatically to $55.6 billion by the end of Q3 2025—nearly quadruple the $15 billion backlog from the previous year. This enormous pipeline of future revenue from existing contracts (sourced from organizations including Meta Platforms and OpenAI) provides substantial confidence that the company’s impressive expansion can persist throughout 2026 and beyond.

Projections suggest CoreWeave will finish 2026 with approximately $20 billion in revenue, representing roughly a four-fold increase from 2024 levels. At a valuation of 12 times sales, CoreWeave trades at only a modest premium to the U.S. technology sector’s average price-to-sales multiple of 9—a discount that the company’s extraordinary growth trajectory appears to justify. Given the market’s historical tendency to reward rapid-growing infrastructure beneficiaries with expanded multiples, these shares to buy could experience continued appreciation as 2026 progresses.

Palantir Technologies: Enterprise AI Adoption Accelerates Revenue and Earnings

Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise and government generative AI software solutions. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), introduced in April 2023, has exceeded all expectations by enabling organizations to integrate their proprietary data with advanced AI capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and decision-making.

The business case for AIP has proven remarkably compelling. Customers report improved analytical capabilities, accelerated automation, and elimination of redundant processes—outcomes that have driven substantial customer expansion. The platform is simultaneously attracting new enterprise clients while generating larger contracts from existing customers who are expanding AIP deployment across additional business functions.

This dual growth dynamic produced a particularly impressive result in Q3 2025, when Palantir’s earnings surpassed prior-year levels by more than 100%. Each successive quarter throughout 2025 demonstrated accelerating earnings expansion, suggesting the company has achieved a genuine inflection point in its commercialization trajectory. Consensus Wall Street forecasts project 40% earnings growth for 2026, yet Palantir’s recent momentum suggests the company could substantially outperform these expectations.

Several metrics underscore why Palantir may exceed consensus guidance. The company’s remaining deal value (RDV)—the backlog of committed but unfulfilled contracts—jumped 91% in Q3 2025 to $8.6 billion, notably outpacing the 63% revenue growth rate during the same period. This divergence suggests customers are committing to AIP deployments faster than the company can execute them. Simultaneously, Palantir added customers at a 45% year-over-year rate, and these new enterprise relationships increasingly expand into additional business units within their organizations.

The underlying unit economics of Palantir’s business model support the potential for triple-digit earnings expansion in 2026. Even at its elevated valuation of 172 times forward earnings, the company’s demonstrated ability to exceed Wall Street forecasts consistently suggests that shares to buy at current levels could reward patient investors substantially. The conviction that Palantir will continue crushing consensus expectations provides a compelling foundation for why growth-oriented investors should consider this security.

Why These Shares Deserve Investor Attention in 2026

Both CoreWeave and Palantir exhibit the fundamental characteristics that historically precede significant stock price appreciation: accelerating revenue growth, expanding customer acquisition, substantial execution pipelines, and the ability to participate in secular trends that remain in their early innings. CoreWeave benefits from the physical infrastructure requirements of AI adoption, while Palantir capitalizes on enterprises’ urgent need to derive productive value from advanced AI technologies.

The combination of healthy revenue visibility, strong unit economics, and participation in the AI revolution’s multiple dimensions makes these companies particularly attractive as shares to buy before the market’s next major advance. While valuations reflect this opportunity, both companies’ demonstrated ability to exceed expectations suggests the premium pricing is justified by execution realities rather than pure investor exuberance.