Best ways to play AI, according to William Blair, as Stargate project rekindles trade

As the artificial intelligence trade reignites, William Blair has its eyes set on a handful of stocks to play the trend. President Donald Trump unveiled Tuesday Stargate , an AI infrastructure project that hopes to tap as much as $500 billion in private investments. Oracle , OpenAI and Softbank are part of the venture, which will begin with an initial $100 billion investment that could be built upon over the next four years. The plans, which suggest more investments is yet to be made, underpinned a resurgence of AI stocks this week. Shares of Nvidia , which is often viewed by investors as a market bellwether and has been at the forefront of the AI boom, surged nearly 7% so far this week. Other tech names with exposure to AI like Meta Platforms and Google parent-company Alphabet have added 4% and 1% week-to-date, respectively. But it was Oracle’s stock that truly showed the benefit of the renewed investor enthusiasm, jumping nearly 16% so far this week. “Our broad conclusion is that we are still in the early innings when it comes to AI development and usage, and the risks of not investing in AI (for institutional investors, hyperscalers, large language model [LLM] providers, enterprises, etc.) substantially outweigh the risks of investing in AI,” analyst Jason Ader wrote. “This is based on our unwavering view that AI has the potential to be as transformative to the global economy as the steam engine, the transistor, and electricity.” Against this backdrop, William Blair named its top ideas to play the continued dominance of AI. Here’s some of the stocks that made the cut. Alphabet stock has gained nearly 34% over the past year. Analyst Jason Ader said Google has quick momentum in the AI race, with its large language model Gemini. “We believe the strength of its Gemini model is growing, and we believe there will continue to be incremental use-cases going forward,” Ader said. “The company’s Waymo division is particularly beneficial as automated driving becomes a reality; its expansion into Austin and Atlanta will begin this year, followed by Miami in 2026.” GOOGL 1Y mountain Alphabet stock. “Going forward, it will continue to deploy capital investments into data centers for AI advancements, which we believe will allow the company to remain a leader in the space,” he added. Meta Platforms also made the list. Shares have gained more than 64% over the past year. Ader also pointed to Meta’s LLM, Llama, as a key reason the firm will remain a leader and important name in AI advancement moving forward. “Equipped with one of the largest proprietary datasets among technology companies, Llama’s base model will continue to be leveraged by other companies looking to fine-tune their own model, in our opinion,” he said. META 1Y mountain Meta Platforms stock. “We continue to feel positive about Meta’s AI adoption and the benefits being realized by advertisers,” he continued. Cloud-based restaurant management stock Toast also made the list. Shares have surged more than 145% over the past year. The analyst noted that the company’s strong customer base of more than 172,000 restaurants is one of its best assets and adding AI capabilities will further cement Toast as the premier platform for eateries. TOST 1Y mountain Toast stock. “Ultimately, Toast is leveraging AI to not only provide insights but make it easy for restaurant owners to act on those insights, which is something we believe will further differentiate Toast’s already-best-in-class platform from its competition; we are not aware of any competitors in the space with remotely similar capabilities,” Ader said. Other notable names on the list include chipmaker Broadcom and electric vehicle giant Tesla .