Cloud GPUs sold out this quarter, market demand for Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture remains insatiable, and management predicts sequential growth of nearly $10 billion in next quarter’s revenue to $65 billion. But for investors looking to 2026 and beyond, Nvidia’s perfection presents a paradox: the law of large numbers is finally catching up.
While Nvidia remains the undisputed king of AI, its size is now a crucial factor. Adding $10 billion in revenue, a huge achievement for any other AI stock, barely moves the needle for a stock valued at nearly $5 trillion. The easy money has been earned. The AI accelerator market share is Nvidia’s to lose, and its competitors are circling.
For 2026, I’m shifting my focus to three AI stocks that have more room to run. These growth stocks are smaller than Nvidia, meaning new AI revenues could fuel their share price growth much faster than for the incumbent giant. They’ve already outperformed Nvidia stock so far this year.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
The story for Advanced micro devices (NASDAQ:AMD) has shifted from “if” it can compete to “when” in 2025. While Nvidia dominates the present, AMD, with its next-gen MI400 series GPUs coming to market in 2026, is positioning itself to capture significant market share starting in the second half of next year.
Recent updates from AMD management suggest a huge turning point is approaching. In addition to competing in raw silicon, AMD could also win on value and availability over the next three years. As the AI market matures, hyperscalers (major cloud computing providers) are looking for a second source to avoid vendor lock-in and supply bottlenecks. AMD’s MI Series accelerators are becoming increasingly popular and offer an attractive price-performance ratio that is impossible for data center CFOs to ignore.
Unlike Nvidia, which is priced for perfection, AMD is priced for skepticism. This creates an asymmetric advantage: If AMD were to capture even 10 to 15% of the AI accelerator market by 2026, the impact on the bottom line would, by a conservative estimate given the roadmap, be transformative in a way that another $10 billion quarter for Nvidia simply isn’t.
With an 83% gain this year, AMD shares have easily outperformed Nvidia’s comparable 41% return.
Broadcom
While Nvidia sells general-purpose GPUs, Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) has mastered the art of the “custom silicon” or ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) market.
The biggest threat to Nvidia isn’t another GPU maker; they are Nvidia’s own customers. Tech giants love Alphabet, MetaplatformsAnd Amazon are increasingly designing their own internal AI chips to run specific workloads more efficiently than general purpose GPUs. Broadcom is the key partner helping these giants design and build these custom chips.
Broadcom’s AI revenue growth is driven by this custom silicon boom, which is accelerating as companies look to reduce overall computing costs.
As AI model workloads shift from “training” (where Nvidia dominates) to “inference” (running the models), the efficiency of Broadcom’s custom ASICs will become a huge competitive advantage. Broadcom offers a way to invest in building out AI infrastructure without just betting on the GPU monopoly forever.
Broadcom stock’s 57% year-to-date gain is better than Nvidia’s.
Celestica
Canadian investors who want an AI game listed directly on the TSX have their pick Celestica (TSX:CLS) despite the market gaining 230% since the beginning of the year. The $49 billion semiconductor manufacturing company fits the description of “another smaller AI stock that could continue to grow revenue in 2026 and beyond.”
Celestica is an AI pick and shovel game. It builds the complex, powerful connectivity and networking hardware that makes AI clusters work. As data centers upgrade to 800G switches and liquid-cooled server racks to handle the heat of Blackwell and AMD chips, Celestica is the manufacturing partner enabling modern data center upgrades and new construction.
As a manufacturing and supply chain partner, Celestica makes money regardless of whose AI chip wins the war in 2026 and beyond. Whether a data center installs Nvidia, AMD, or custom Broadcom chips, it still needs the fast switches and advanced server racks that Celestica offers. Continued sales and earnings growth should help support CLS stock’s momentum.
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