Artificial intelligence (AI) is responsible for adding billions of dollars of value to a handful of companies over the past few years. Nvidiafor example, briefly touched an amount of 5 trillion dollars market capitalization this year, thanks to its dominant position in the graphics processing unit (GPU) market. Four more companies sit firmly above the $2 trillion threshold heading into the new year.
But three AI Actions currently have a similar market cap, around $1.6 trillion as of this writing, and are in the running to become the first new $2 trillion company in 2026: Metaplatforms(NASDAQ:META), Tesla(NASDAQ:TSLA)And Broadcom(NASDAQ:AVGO). Here’s my prediction for the next company to hit this milestone, and it could happen as early as next year.
Image source: Getty Images.
Meta, Tesla, and Broadcom have all seen their stock prices heavily influenced by advances in AI this year.
Meta stock soared higher earlier this year as its efforts to improve its recommendation algorithms paid off. Advertising revenue grew as time spent on its apps increased and ads became more effective. However, the stock has recently taken a step back as management shared plans to increase AI spending.
Tesla’s value is strongly linked to its robotaxi service and AI innovations. The stock received a boost over the summer when it launched its robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas. Investors added to these gains with promising progress on the company’s next-generation AI chip for its vehicles.
Broadcom’s custom AI accelerator business has gained momentum in 2025, with the company signing big deals with OpenAI and Anthropic, with the latter buying AlphabetTensor processing units (TPUs) designed by Broadcom. To that end, Alphabet and Broadcom are seeing excellent progress in moving more developer workloads to TPUs, which offer greater power efficiency and cost savings compared to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Broadcom stock took a step back after its latest earnings report as many analysts were disappointed by management’s expectations that increased AI chip sales would lead to a lower gross margin.
Although these three stocks are on track to reach a $2 trillion valuation in 2026, I expect meta platforms to reach that milestone first. Here’s why.
Even with annual revenue of $200 billion, Meta continues to rapidly increase its bottom line. Adjusted earnings per share climbed 20% in the third quarter, thanks to AI improvements.
Meta has seen increases in ad impressions and price per ad for eight consecutive quarters. This indicates that it increases user engagement and opens new places in its apps for advertising while making ads more effective.
Management attributes a change in its recommendation algorithm to make it more general across all formats as the main reason users are spending more time on its apps. Meta saw similar improvements when applying the same methodology to its advertising algorithm. In other words, bigger models directly translated into increased revenue.
This trend is expected to continue in 2026 as Meta opens up more advertising opportunities, including on Threads and WhatsApp. It could also begin monetizing Meta AI, its generative AI chatbot. Improvements to its algorithms over the past few years should allow it to quickly increase its advertising without having as much of a negative impact on its pricing as we’ve seen in the past.
However, the biggest opportunity for Meta in 2026 could be the expansion of its generative AI capabilities. He would work on an AI agent capable of managing advertising campaigns for small businesses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly talks about being able to handle everything related to creating, testing, and optimizing ad campaigns on his platform through an AI agent.
And chatbots specializing in sales and customer service for a business could open the door for more businesses to push Facebook and Instagram users to start messaging them through Meta’s chat apps.
With small and medium-sized businesses accounting for the majority of advertisers on the Meta platform, these innovations have the potential to significantly increase the amount they are willing to spend on advertising. If these clients’ overhead costs are much lower, they can increase their advertising spend and grow their business faster.
These efforts should fuel another year of strong revenue growth. And while depreciation expenses from increased AI-related capital spending could weigh on earnings growth, Meta should be able to manage continued earnings per share improvement with the help of share repurchases.
The stock trades at just 26 times forward earnings, which is well below Broadcom’s multiple and less than a tenth of the multiple at which Tesla shares trade. I expect Meta to achieve a higher earnings multiple as it once again proves its AI spending is worth it in 2026, pushing its valuation to $2 trillion.
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Adam Levy holds positions in Alphabet and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool holds positions and recommends Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Mad Motley has a disclosure policy.
