Beyond rewriting the script for work life, artificial intelligence is changing the very face of the business world. Gartner has projected that worldwide AI spending will reach $2.52 trillion this year, a 44% year-over-year jump.
To the many thousands of vendors of AI-driven technologies, those trillions of dollars are revenue. So, which ones are getting the biggest share of the expanding pie?
BestBrokers.com, an investing research platform, has released a study that reports on revenue growth for 20 publicly listed companies across the AI supply chain from 2022 through 2025.
For the most part, the massively successful companies in this arena are not the ones from which your company buys AI tools directly.
“The AI economy in 2026 is not primarily a software story — it is an industrial build-out, and the companies capturing the most value are the ones manufacturing the chips, memory modules, cooling systems and fiber optics that make these AI products possible,” wrote Paul Hoffman of BestBrokers.com.
With respect to revenue growth rate, the runaway leader is CoreWeave, whose modest AI revenue of $15.8 million in 2022 ballooned to $5.1 billion by 2025, for a nifty compound annual growth rate of almost $600%. The company provides cloud-based graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure to AI developers and enterprises, including Microsoft, OpenAI, IBM, Meta and Nvidia.
“Traditional cloud providers could not absorb GPU demand fast enough, and CoreWeave captured the overflow, effectively building a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure business in the time it takes most startups to find product-market fit,” Hoffman wrote.
It’s worth noting that several observers and investors have raised flags about the circular nature of business deals between these major AI players. That has led some to voice concerns about a forthcoming AI “bubble.”
Next on the growth-rate list was a much more well-known name, Nvidia, which saw its AI revenue grow from $14.6 billion to $167.9 billion, for a compound annual growth rate of $125%, over the four-year period. The growth has been fueled by the company’s near-monopoly in the GPU training market
Its customer base is dominated by four “hyperscalers” — Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet — but the company has also gone into the automotive and industrial manufacturing sectors.
Nvidia, which also has a key partnership with CoreWeave, had by far the largest increase in AI revenue between 2022 and 2025, at $153.3 billion
Meanwhile, another measure of AI companies’ success could be stock performance. There, the runaway top performer has been Palantir Technologies, whose share price realized a compound annual growth rate of 876% from 2022 to 2025. The stock rose from $18.21 to $177.75.
Palantir sells an AI-driven enterprise operating system, with about half its revenue coming from government clients and half from a growing commercial business in the aviation, energy/utilities, financial services, health care and manufacturing sectors.
The scale of Palantir’s stock-price growth “reflects how dramatically the market has re-rated enterprise software: what was once seen as a niche government analytics provider is now priced as mission-critical infrastructure with broadening commercial adoption,” Hoffman wrote.
Other stock stalwarts included Vertiv, which builds cooling and power management systems for data centers and has returned 549%; Nvidia (534%); semiconductor solutions and infrastructure software provider Broadcom (420%); and SKhynix, a critical infrastructure provider for the world’s largest technology companies (397%).
The market losers “tell their own story,” Hoffman said. Intel’s shares fell 28% over the four years, Marvell Technology lost 3%, and traditional colocation providers Digital Realty and Equinix both lost ground (-13% and -9%), respectively.
“The market is drawing a sharp line between companies positioned for AI-specific infrastructure demand and those serving the broad data center market — and punishing anyone on the wrong side of it,” Hoffman wrote.
BestBrokers.com also reported on a reallocation of private capital to AI startups.
Between the second quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, such capital totaled barely more than $20 billion each quarter. However, beginning with the fourth quarter of 2024, the quarterly total has exceeded $56 billion every quarter, with highs of $75.5 billion and $72.2 billion in last year’s first and fourth quarters, respectively.
