By Peter Cohan
Publication Date: 2026-05-18 10:30:00
Woman investor uses laptop and smartphone to analyzes charts. Nvidia, Palantir and CoreWeave are all AI stocks but offer potential investors very different potential rewards and risks.
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The AI boom kicked off in May 2023. That’s when AI chip designer Nvidia announced a surprising leap in demand for its graphics processing units – convincing me that the rapid growth in ChatGPT users was evidence of the next big thing.
While Nvidia leads the pack of publicly-traded AI companies, CoreWeave, which went public in March 2025 by monetizing its stash of GPUs, has also benefited from the growth in spending on AI data centers which train and operate AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Palantir, which uses data analysis to help some government agencies and private companies get their jobs done, is different from Nvidia and CoreWeave because it uses AI chatbots, but does not invent and deploy its own.
Nvidia, CoreWeave And Palantir At A Glance
Although Nvidia, CoreWeave and Palantira are leaders in their respective industries, they offer potential investors very different potential rewards and risks.
The Case For Nvidia (NVDA)
Nvidia, whose shares have risen 79% in the year ending May 12, is the leader in AI chip design. It competes primarily in the hardware accelerator and semiconductor market, providing the GPUs (like the H100, B200 Blackwell, and Rubin architectures) that AI data centers use to train and operate chatbots.
Nvidia’s share of the AI GPU market is…
