If you thought 2025 would be the year the AI bubble finally popped, well, you were wrong. Despite geopolitical drama, the DeepSeek panic, and endless chatter about overvaluation, the AI trade kept chugging along and dragged the stock market with it.
The Nasdaq-100 closed the year up 20.2%, and I/O Fund analyst Beth Kindig just dropped her review of the year's top 10 tech stocks. It's essentially a roadmap for figuring out which companies will lead the charge in 2026, and the pattern is surprisingly clear once you know where to look.
Hardware Ate Software's Lunch
Here's the thing about 2025: everyone finally figured out that AI needs actual physical stuff to work. The early AI boom was all about chips and models, but last year the market woke up to reality. You can't run massive AI workloads without solving some pretty basic infrastructure problems: where do you store all that data, how do you move it around fast enough, and how do you power the whole operation without melting the grid?
SanDisk Corp. (SNDK) became the S&P 500's top performer with an absolutely bonkers 559.4% return. The company rode a wave of explosive demand for AI flash storage, because it turns out that AI applications need somewhere to keep all those training datasets and model outputs.
Meanwhile, Bloom Energy Corp. (BE) shot up 291.2% by tackling the power problem. Data centers running AI workloads consume ungodly amounts of electricity, and Bloom's fuel cell solutions became critical infrastructure. The narrative shifted from digital hype to tangible hardware scarcity, and the market rewarded companies solving real physical bottlenecks.
Palantir Proved Software Isn't Dead
While hardware companies dominated the leaderboard, Palantir Technologies Inc. (PLTR) managed a 135% return and stood out as one of the few software winners. The difference? Palantir's gains came from actual business fundamentals, not speculation.
Kindig highlights that Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform drove massive revenue acceleration, hitting 62.8% year-over-year growth in the third quarter. That's real money from real customers, not vaporware. By embedding AI models into complex workflows, Palantir demonstrated that AI can generate genuine commercial value.
The company achieved a Rule of 40 score of 114%, which is frankly absurd in a good way. For those keeping score at home, the Rule of 40 means your revenue growth rate plus your profit margin should exceed 40%. Palantir more than doubled that, separating itself from competitors selling unproven narratives.