Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting exponentially smarter every year, as companies continue to pour billions into more chips for training computers to think like a human. McKinsey estimates that data centers will require nearly $7 trillion of investment by 2030 to meet demand for more computing power.

The rationale for this investment is the returns businesses expect to earn. For example, Morgan Stanley estimates that AI will create $40 trillion in operational efficiencies for businesses over the long term.

Those numbers spell wealth-building returns for investors who place their bets on the right stocks. Here are two AI growth stocks that are surging right now and could soar over the next few years.

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1. SoundHound AI

AI will transform how people use devices, control their cars, and control things in their homes, and SoundHound AI (SOUN -3.02%) is well-positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. The stock has soared 244% over the last year and is just getting started.

SoundHound’s voice AI solutions are making it easier for people to interact with devices with normal conversational speech. Its advantage in this market is built on 20 years of collecting data from customer interactions. The company has used this data to build a proprietary multilingual AI model called Polaris.

SoundHound has been adopted by leading restaurant brands for customer ordering, but is looking to expand across several industries. In the second quarter, revenue tripled from the year-ago quarter, as SoundHound’s voice AI platform has now exceeded 1 billion queries per month.

The company is moving quickly to capture what it previously estimated was a $140 billion addressable market for voice AI technology. The acquisition of Amelia positions the company to expand beyond restaurants to other enterprise markets like insurance, retail, and healthcare. It’s seeing several enterprises adopt its autonomous AI agent platform, Amelia 7.0, which can reason, understand, and complete tasks without human intervention.

Soundhound isn’t turning a profit yet as it continues to invest all its revenue into advancing its voice AI technology. But the stock has traded between 21x to 111x sales over the past year, and the current price-to-sales multiple (P/S) is 45.

This valuation is expensive, but this is a small company that could potentially lead a multibillion-dollar market. Investors should expect the stock to follow revenue growth, which could lead to significant returns over the next few years.

Image source: Getty Images.

2. IREN Limited

Investors looking for a “pick and shovel” stock to profit from the AI gold rush should look no further than the companies building the data centers for AI workloads. This is a big opportunity for IREN Limited (IREN 3.38%), which stands for Iris Energy Limited. IREN previously focused on Bitcoin mining to generate revenue but is increasingly shifting its focus to using its data centers to serve the growing demand for AI cloud services, which is a more attractive business over the long term.

Bitcoin mining is currently generating over $1 billion in annualized revenue for IREN. Management sees a much more profitable business in offering AI compute, so it’s taking the profits from its mining business and investing those funds in data centers that offer cloud-based compute services for AI workloads.

IREN’s fiscal 2025 revenue was a record $501 million, a 168% year-over-year increase. Its mining operations helped turn a $87 million profit. The strong financials, along with the recent news that it has secured preferred partner status with Nvidia, have sent the stock up 180% year to date.

Achieving partner status with Nvidia is a big deal. This will allow IREN to expand its AI cloud offering with liquid-cooled GB300 NVL72 computing systems. IREN says that it’s on a path to eventually offer over 60,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips at its British Columbia data center sites, with the potential for 19,000 GB300 chips at its Horizon 1 data center in Texas.

Building data centers requires high upfront expenditures but can generate substantial profits over the long term. Wall Street analysts expect IREN’s revenue to reach $1.5 billion by fiscal 2028, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) increasing to over $1.2 billion.

The stock’s current P/S multiple of 15 seems appropriate, if not conservative, for a high-growth, high-margin business. The stock should continue to climb with the company’s revenue growth and any announcements with hyperscalers that choose IREN for their AI infrastructure needs. Based on analyst revenue estimates, the stock could easily double — if not triple — over the next few years.