There’s really only one thing about seeking out the best technology stocks that stays the same year in and year out:
It’s difficult.
The technology sector is constantly in a state of flux. And is there any wonder why? A group of businesses that make their money by innovating … well, their innovations have a tendency to upend their own industries again and again and again. Not to mention, not every technological innovation is a winner. For every iPhone, there’s a hoverboard. For every artificial intelligence (AI), there’s a 3D TV. And even winning technologies don’t equate to predictable winners.
Just consider this thought on AI from JPMorgan’s 2026 Global Outlook (emphasis ours): “The AI/data center investment cycle is a multi-trillion-dollar, multi-year event reshaping capital markets, credit structures, and the technology sector. While the funding ecosystem is robust, risks around power, monetization, and disruption remain front and center. Investors should prepare for continued rapid growth, evolving funding structures, and heightened sector volatility as the cycle unfolds.”
How, then, do you separate the best tech stocks to buy now from the fad stocks trading on short-lived news trends? And how do today’s small technology stocks become tomorrow’s tech giants? Read on, and I’ll discuss that, and give you an overview of the best tech stocks for 2026.
Editor’s Note: Tabular data presented in this article are up-to-date as of Dec. 17, 2025.
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Disclaimer: This article does not constitute individualized investment advice. Securities, funds, and/or other investments appear for your consideration and not as personalized investment recommendations. Act at your own discretion.
Table of Contents
Why Invest in the Tech Sector?
Many investors are interested in top tech stocks for good reason. Disruptive technologies can sometimes lead to dramatic revenue growth, and dramatic gains in a firm’s stock price as a result.
In fact, technology companies sometimes chase that revenue growth for years without ever focusing on bottom-line profits. Some of the best-performing tech (and “tech-esque”) stocks in history include Amazon.com (AMZN) and Meta Platforms (META), which both prioritized ramping up their long-term scale over short-term profitability.
And look where they are now. Both are among the biggest companies on the planet, outperforming the market by wide margins over the last several years.
This is why many investors look for growth stocks within the tech sector and tech-adjacent companies. It’s not for the short-term profits or dividends, but rather the hopes of a “moonshot” stock that grows exponential revenue growth in short order, delivering life-changing profits to its investors in the process.
The Best Tech Stocks to Invest In
Some of the best-performing tech stocks are very recognizable names. But before you buy any of them, don’t forget that investing is fundamentally about the future. That means learning about the product pipeline and R&D beyond what’s on the surface.
Leading tech firms are often the parent company of lesser-known products or services that could be just as interesting. Particularly when it comes to entrenched mega-cap tech stocks, their future potential depends on revenue streams that have yet to be fully realized yet—not the big-name products consumers currently use.
The tech stocks here are listed in reverse order of market capitalization (so, from smallest to largest).
8. Monolithic Power Systems
— Industry: Semiconductors
— Market capitalization: $43.7 billion
— Dividend yield: 0.7%
Semiconductor stocks will always feature prominently in any list of the best tech stocks, but Monolithic Power Systems (MPWR) isn’t your average chip company.
MPWR designs, produces, and sells power circuits found in the automotive, enterprise data, consumer, communications, industrial, and other markets worldwide. These systems help convert and control voltages of a wide array of electronic systems, from servers, apps, and notebooks to home appliances and satellite communications.
That’s a big change from where Monolithic used to be.
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“A deep product pipeline and steady flow of design wins have steadily diversified MPWR away from traditional consumer products and into the communications, industrial, automotive, and networking markets,” say Oppenheimer analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform (equivalent of Buy). “MPWR sets up well to outperform the broader semiconductor market with both an improving margin profile and an accelerating top-line outlook, in our view. We are long-term buyers.”
MPWR isn’t as well-covered as many of the other stocks on this list, but most of the pros who analyze the stock are bullish on it. Currently, Monolithic Power Systems’ stock enjoys 13 Buys versus two Holds and one Sell.
Looking forward, analysts expect revenues to improve by about 20% annually over the next two years, and longer-term estimates peg profit growth at about 25% per year on average.
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7. Datadog
— Industry: Cybersecurity
— Market capitalization: $47.9 billion
— Dividend yield: N/A
Cybersecurity has been a growing theme for decades, lifting the fortunes of companies that specialize in it and prompting some larger tech conglomerates to add security capabilities to their repertoire.
Datadog (DDOG) is in the former group. The company operates an observability and security platform for cloud applications that is used by thousands of customers. Among its products and solutions are infrastructure and application performance monitoring, log management, digital experience monitoring, data observability, network monitoring, error tracking, and more.
The company’s revenues have been growing like a weed for years—the top line tripled between its last full year as a private company (2018) and its first full year as a publicly traded company (2020), then quadrupled between 2020 and 2024. Datadog also delivered its first full-year profit on a GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) basis in 2023, then reported a 280% jump in earnings in 2024.
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Wall Street generally loves what it sees going forward, too. DDOG’s bull camp is jam-packed at 39 Buys, against five Holds and no Sells.
Datadog, like many tech stocks, is carrying some negative price momentum into 2026, but from a business perspective, it closed out the calendar year right with a stellar Q3 report in November.
“Datadog reported strong third-quarter results, outperforming consensus on all key metrics,” say William Blair analysts Jake Roberge and Jacob Zerbib, who rate the stock at Outperform. “In our view, highlights from the quarter included revenue growth of 28%, topping the Street by nearly 500 basis points, and the company’s early renewal with its largest AI-native customer, which should help mitigate investor concerns about potential churn in this account. Datadog now has 15 AI-native customers with $1 million or more in annual spend and 100 AI-native customers spending over $100,000 on the platform.”
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6. Palo Alto Networks
— Industry: Cybersecurity
— Market capitalization: $127.9 billion
— Dividend yield: N/A
In an age of persistent cybersecurity and hacking concerns, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) stands out as a company with both a reliable customer base as well as the near certainty of increased revenue coming its way across the coming years.
Investors have been dealing with short-term turbulence as the cybersecurity darling massively changes how it does business. Specifically, Palo Alto is migrating to a security platform approach, and it’s banking on comped services to attract customers to it. That, as well as a slowdown in business with the federal government, have kept PANW wobbling since the start of 2024.
And yet, the pros remain extremely bullish on Palo Alto’s longer-term prospects. The stock currently has 41 Buys versus 11 Holds and three Sells.
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“The cybersecurity environment is, if anything, getting more toxic as generative AI fuels even more sophisticated, rapid and toxic cyber-attacks as well as enabling better defensive tools. GenAI and cloud expansion have made cybersecurity even more critical to enterprises,” says Argus Research analyst Joseph Bonner (Buy). “Palo Alto continues to stand out from its sector peers with not just best-in-class technology integrated into a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, but also its rapid product innovation cycle, focused on next-generation cloud security, secure access at the service edge, and automated security operations. We expect the company to continue to invest in its next-generation cybersecurity services.”
Palo Alto will also enter 2026 with a lot more firepower than it entered 2025 with. In August 2025, it announced it would acquire CyberArk Software (CYBR), a software-based identity security solutions and services. Then in November, it snapped up Chronosphere, a cloud native observability platform.
“The rationale is Chronosphere can deliver observability capabilities at one-third of the typical cost of competitors, positioning it as a winner as AI expands workloads,” say Jefferies analyst Joseph Gallo and Brent Thill (Buy). “Additionally, PANW sees an opportunity to combine its remediation abilities with the observability offerings of Chronosphere. There is some execution risk … that said, we believe the acquisition makes sense for PANW given it’s a quality asset than can benefit from AI proliferation & eventually cross-sell into XSIAM [Extended Security Intelligence & Automation Management].”
5. Shopify
— Industry: E-commerce
— Market capitalization: $211.7 billion
— Dividend yield: N/A
Shopify (SHOP) is an e-commerce infrastructure company that helps small and mid-sized businesses market and sell products through various digital sales channels. The basics include web and mobile storefronts, but SHOP also supports “omnichannel” integration with brick-and-mortar locations to manage inventory, as well as analytics and reporting to maximize profitability and customer loyalty.
We all know the potential of e-commerce thanks to the success of Amazon. But SHOP is concerned with every other merchant out there that also has the potential to reach new customers in a digital age.
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And Wedbush analysts believe SHOP will be one of the winners of a continued AI cycle.
“In a nutshell, this AI Revolution is just beginning today and we believe tech stocks and the AI winners should be bought given our view this is Year 3 of what will be a 10-year cycle of this AI Revolution buildout,” says analyst Dan Ives. “We are adding Shopify to the IVES AI 30 list as the company continues to accelerate AI integration through agentic commerce, personalized shopping and operational efficiencies through organic as well as strategic AI partnerships to capitalize on its expanding [total addressable market].”
Shopify has a large number of analysts on its side, at 32 Buys versus 19 Holds and one Sell. The pros believe SHOP will grow its top line by more than 20% in each of the next two years. And while earnings growth is expected to moderate significantly to about 15% in 2025, it’s projected to accelerate again next year, to nearly 30%.
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4. Broadcom
— Industry: Semiconductors
— Market capitalization: $1.5 trillion
— Dividend yield: 0.8%
Broadcom (AVGO) is one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. It designs, develops, manufactures, and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software products for a wide variety of uses, including (but hardly limited to) artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, networking, wireless, storage, and industrial automation.
The company has been an innovator in its own right, but you can also chalk up much of its scale to a history of aggressive merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity. The company—itself the product of a 2016 merger between Broadcom Corporation and Avago Technologies (hence the AVGO ticker)—has swallowed up the likes of LSI Corporation, Brocade, CA Technologies, VMware, and Symantec’s enterprise security business.
Regardless of how it got there, the resulting entity is one of Wall Street’s most beloved chip stocks, at 45 Buys, just two Holds, and zero Sells.
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“We believe AVGO has one of the most strategically and financially attractive business models in semiconductors,” say Oppenheimer analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform. Among the reasons they love Broadcom are a “sustained competitive advantage in the high-end filter market, a ‘sticky’ non-mobile business, efficiently managed manufactury, and substantial earnings and free cash flow growth.
That bullishness for 2026 comes amid what will almost certainly be a market-smashing performance in 2025 … but also amid a drop into bear-market territory during the year’s final innings prompted by the company’s warning about AI chip sales cutting into its gross profit margins. Still, the pros remained unfazed.
“While not inexpensive, we continue to see a favorable risk/reward equation for the stock on the back of sustained AI demand across its ASIC and networking businesses,” say William Blair analysts Sebastien Naji and Ana Bilbao. “Industry-leading IP and a seasoned design operation developed across multiple generations of ASICs are cementing Broadcom as the leading alternative to Nvidia’s merchant GPUs.”
Also worth noting is AVGO’s rapidly growing dividend, which has exploded by 80% in just the past five years alone. That puts Broadcom not just among the best tech stocks to buy, but also the best dividend stocks for beginners.
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3. Amazon
— Industry: Online retail/cloud
— Market capitalization: $2.4 trillion
— Dividend yield: N/A
Amazon (AMZN) dominates the retail world. It is a one-stop shop for nearly anything you could want. And it has redefined customer expectations—they were a pioneer in two-day, one-day and even same-day shipping. And for that reason, Amazon is actually considered a consumer cyclical stock.
But it’s also so much more. Amazon is also the world’s biggest cloud provider through AWS, it’s an entertainment company through its Amazon Prime service, and it’s one of the biggest advertising companies, behind only giants Google and Facebook. AMZN makes for such an attractive stock because it’s supported by a diversified business with ample opportunities to enter new markets and disrupt well-seated industry incumbents.
Because of all that, Amazon is typically mentioned in the same breath as other technology names, and that’s why we’re including AMZN among our best tech stocks for 2026.
If Amazon does pop off in the coming year, you can absolutely call it a comeback. AMZN shares were dreadful in 2025, poised to finish the year only marginally higher (and greatly underperforming the market) thanks to weaker consumer spending, worries about AWS growth, and other concerns. But despite all this, the pros are extremely bullish on AMZN in 2026, in part because of its final earnings report of calendar 2025.
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“AWS, perceived as growing more slowly than hyperscale rivals in the AI race, posted its strongest top-line growth in nearly three years, while margins expanded from a weak 2Q25,” says Argus Research analyst Jim Kelleher. “Amazon has underperformed its peer group in 2025 although it has lately begun to participate in the AI rally. We believe investors should use stock weakness as an opportunity to establish or dollar-average into undisputed category leader Amazon.”
Agentic AI, mentioned earlier, will be one of artificial intelligence’s major subplots in 2026, and Amazon is expected to be in that conversation.
“AWS CEO Matt Garman emphasized Amazon‘s focus on AI agents, predicting that enterprises will build ‘billions’ of agents as they become increasingly autonomous, scalable, & independent,” says a team of BofA Global Research analysts, who rate the stock at Buy. “AWS introduced three frontier agents and can work together: Kiro Autonomous Agent that retains context across sessions so developers can minimize downtime; AWS Security Agent that embeds security upstream by scanning code for vulnerabilities; & AWS DevOps Agent that is always-on, can instantly triage incidents, and recommend improvements to code.”
Truist analyst Youssef Squali, who also sees AMZN as a Buy, points to the potential of yet another new business in the Amazon constellation.
“Project Kuiper, Amazon’s emerging satellite internet offering, is likely to become incrementally more important to the Amazon growth story as the company accelerates the pace of satellite launches over the next 12-18 months, and begins commercialization by the end of 2025,” Squali says. “Project Kuiper is ready for launch—we believe it could deliver annual revenue of $6 billion by 2030 against an investment of $13 billion-$15 billion.”
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2. Microsoft
— Industry: Enterprise software
— Market capitalization: $3.6 trillion
— Dividend yield: 0.8%
Microsoft (MSFT) is a dominant tech stock that has seen amazing growth over the past few decades. But despite that, as well as a $3 trillion-plus market cap, MSFT isn’t showing many signs of slowing down.
The average person knows Microsoft for its iconic Windows and Office productivity software for personal computers, as well as its Xbox gaming console and related software. But Microsoft also is a major player in cloud computing, via its still-growing Azure cloud services, and an emerging titan in artificial intelligence—a position it further cemented in 2025 with the announcement of a strategic partnership with Anthropic (as well as a chipmaker I’ll get to next).
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“We see this announcement as further bolstering Microsoft’s ongoing buildout of its AI ecosystem,” says HSBC’s Stephen Bersey, Head of US Technology Research, who rates the stock at Buy. “For enterprise strength AI, vendors and developers will require many resources, services, and model choices to build out AI solutions. And this deal represents a widening of model choice with the addition of Anthropic.
“Overall, the strategic announcement aligns with our thesis from last year (Microsoft: Winning the cloud and AI battles, 1 Nov 2024) that Microsoft is very well positioned for the AI mega-cycle as it has ample in-context data, cloud infrastructure, AI models, and AI fabric in order to orchestrate a complex AI agentic ecosystem.”
Another one of the ways in which Microsoft is on the bleeding edge of AI is through a new generation of AI data centers.
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“Microsoft has made headlines for Fairwater—a large-scale, purposefully designed distributed network of AI data centers, [leveraging] sophisticated silicon and cooling techniques that require near-zero water waste,” says Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan (Buy). “Microsoft is planning to take on massive training workloads that can cover hundreds of thousands of GPUs. With shorter-than-usual cable lengths coupled with AI WAN, Microsoft can connect multiple distributed data centers to do training in one cohesive swoop. Therefore, millions of GPUs can be involved in a single training run. This leads to lower latency and greater power density, thereby creating the perfect recipe to train larger models in the future.
Revenue and profit projections for fiscal 2026 are currently in the mid-teens, and pros believe the stock can indeed keep getting bigger and delivering profits for its shareholders. In fact, the pros are about as positive as you could want, with 54 Buy calls on the stock versus four Holds and nary a bear. That’s easily good enough to land MSFT among the best tech stocks heading into 2026.
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1. Nvidia
— Industry: Semiconductors
— Market capitalization: $4.2 trillion
— Dividend yield: < 0.1%
Nvidia (NVDA) is the world’s top chip stock thanks to its dominance in semiconductors that are used in cutting-edge technologies. Applications for this firm’s hardware include self-driving cars, cryptocurrency mining, and other in-demand and growth-oriented areas of the 21st century economy.
But No. 1 with a bullet is the artificial intelligence market.
On the one hand, Nvidia believes AI infrastructure can become a $3 trillion to $4 trillion opportunity over the next half-decade. On the other hand, many investors are starting to wonder whether AI is in a bubble, pointing to privately held OpenAI’s massive capacity commitments that seem to dwarf its actual size, as well as so-called circular funding.
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“NVDA argues that the ground truth dynamics are not bubble-like, because three separate demand drivers are in play: (1) the transition of general purpose compute from CPU to parallel (GPU) compute; (2) the growth of generative AI replacing classic machine learning; (3) the rise of argentic AI,” says Truist Managing Director William Stein. “There is another argument that we see as even more compelling. We see the telltale sign of a bubble as gear that has been ordered or shipped for which there is no operational or economic value. On its conference call, NVDA noted that its A100 chips, which began shipping six years ago, are all still in the field and are running at 100% utilization. We believe this is the clearest indication that we are not in a bubble … at least not yet.”
That’s not to say there won’t be bumps. Indeed, as I write this, NVDA is close to falling into a bear market off its October 2025 highs. Even then, the chipmaker’s shares are still on pace to beat the market for full-year 2025, and a more relaxed valuation has merely drawn more analysts into the bull camp: Nvidia has earned a whopping 60 Buy calls, dwarfing three Holds and one Sell.
They largely expect AI’s specialization to continue the red-hot growth at Nvidia. Analysts see revenue growth averaging 55% annually over the next two years, and long-term earnings growth at a clip of more than 35%. Indeed, NVDA sits on our list of the market’s best growth stocks right now, too.
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Is Technology the Best Sector in the Stock Market?
Technology stocks regularly are among the best-performing stocks on Wall Street, and they historically beat the broader S&P 500 index. But that should not be misunderstood to mean that the tech sector is a sure thing. According to Pensions & Investments, the technology sector slumped by 28.2% in 2022—more than 10 percentage points worse than the broader market.
In other words, there are lots of reasons to like technology stocks and the tech sector. But there’s no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to investing.
Are There Any Downsides to Investing in Tech Companies?
Many tech companies can be quite volatile as they pursue their long-term potential, often at the cost of short-term profits—or even short-term stock performance. One of the most common downsides of investing in tech stocks is that they can move up and down much more dramatically than sleepy sectors such as utility stocks or consumer staples.
That’s also what makes them popular stocks to buy, however. Those big moves are great when they are in an investor’s favor. Just be aware that the big downside of investing in tech companies is … well, the potential for bigger downsides.
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The vast majority of American dividend stocks pay regular, reliable payouts—and they do so at a more frequent clip (quarterly) than dividend stocks in most other countries (typically every six months or year).
Still, if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “it’d sure be nice to collect these dividends more often,” you don’t have to look far. While they’re not terribly common, American exchanges boast dozens of monthly dividend stocks.
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