Celestica (CLS), Arista (ANET), and Credo Technologies (CRDO) are among investment firm BNP Paribas’ top artificial intelligence stocks for 2026.
“The AI party continues [as] data center investment appears durable with lead times supporting improved visibility through ’26 across the server, networking, and storage ecosystems,” analyst Karl Ackerman wrote in a note to clients. “We are raising estimates for the companies most exposed to AI infrastructure bottlenecks, namely the optical transceiver supply chain, memory IC vendors, and [hard disk driver] vendors, which prompt[ed] our Seagate upgrade to Outperform.”
As such, the firm said it likes the aforementioned trio for this year, as well as Broadcom (AVGO) and Macom (MTSI). It also raised its price targets and estimates on Micron (MU), Sandisk (SNDK), Seagate (STX), and Western Digital (WDC), due in part to the fact the sector is “entering a historic upcycle with rising prices across DRAM, NAND, and HDDs.”
Micron, Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital were all sharply higher in late morning trading on Wednesday.
In conjunction, the firm said the skyrocketing memory prices are a negative for other parts of the semiconductor industry, and lowered its respective price targets on Ingram Micro (INGM), Qorvo (QRVO) and Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) as a result.
The firm also said it expects the total addressable market for the data center networking market to near $120B by 2028, amid “insatiable demand for AI servers, both custom and GPU-based.”