NVIDIA (NVDA -2.25%) is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the booming demand for all things artificial intelligence (AI). The company’s GPUs are valuable devices for training large language models that form the backbone of generative AI. Big tech companies and cloud providers are snapping up as many Nvidia chips as they can get their hands on.

The results for Nvidia have been nothing short of phenomenal. In the last two years, Nvidia’s market capitalization has increased from about $424 billion to $3.1 trillion. The company is currently just over Microsoft as the second largest company in the world behind only Apple.

While Nvidia is getting a lot of attention, it’s important to remember that it’s not the only AI stock you can invest in. There are dozens of other great companies involved in the growth of AI. And the long-term prospects for some of them are even better than Nvidia’s. That’s why I expect these three companies could outperform Nvidia in value over the next three years.

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1. Meta platforms

Meta-platforms (META -1.30%) is one of Nvidia’s biggest customers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently committed to amassing 350,000 of the chipmaker’s H100 GPUs by the end of this year. The company’s capital expenditure, which management estimates at $37 billion to $40 billion this year, is surpassed only by the major public cloud companies like Microsoft and alphabet (GOOG 0.30%) (GOOGL 0.33%)And management expects meta capital expenditures to continue to rise in 2025.

These massive investments will take some time to pay off, but Meta is better positioned than almost any other company to integrate AI capabilities into its products. The company sees opportunities to improve its advertising business, grow its business messaging service (with custom AI chatbots), develop the most popular AI assistant for consumers, and increase engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and its messaging apps.

This should lead to strong revenue and profit growth over the long term, even with an increase in depreciation expenses due to the increased data center investments. Importantly, the growth in expenses will slow over time as Meta determines exactly how much data center capacity it needs to train and use its generative AI developments.

The stock currently trades at a P/E ratio of about 26, which is reasonable for a company with its growth prospects. However, Meta could beat earnings estimates if its generative AI capabilities increase ad rates and engagement on Facebook and Instagram and open up new revenue opportunities through business messaging and interactions with AI assistants. With a market cap of about $1.35 trillion, the company could grow quickly over the next three years and overtake Nvidia if any of its AI projects show very strong results.

2. Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing

Semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan (TSM -1.29%)also known as TSMC, is the largest chipmaker in the world. When a company like Nvidia develops a new chip, it contracts with TSMC to manufacture that chip.

TSMC’s biggest advantage is its size. It accounts for over 60% of all chip manufacturing spending, giving the company more money to reinvest in expanding its capacity to produce faster, more powerful and more energy efficient chips. Its cutting-edge design capabilities allow the company to maintain a dominant market share, as chip designers cannot achieve the same results from anyone else.

TSMC is relatively agnostic about who designs the chips. It can make an Nvidia chip just as easily as it can make a custom-designed chip from Meta, Microsoft or Alphabet. And that’s exactly what it’s doing. That puts it in a much less precarious position than Nvidia when it comes to the future of AI data center chips.

Many of Nvidia’s largest customers have their own chip designs specifically for training and using large language models. These chips are not as flexible in their use as Nvidia’s, but they are more power efficient and cheaper to buy, making them increasingly valuable as companies like Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and others advance and scale their AI development.

Meanwhile, TSMC stands to benefit from rising expenses and increasing competition for its limited resources. Its shares trade at 26 times forward earnings, but they arguably deserve a higher multiple because high demand and competition should help the bottom line and its earnings are better protected on the downside. For comparison, Nvidia trades at a forward earnings multiple of 48. The true value for both companies is likely somewhere in between. If TSMC experiences multiple expansions and Nvidia experiences a contraction, TSMC could surpass Nvidia’s market cap over time.

3. Alphabet

Alphabet is already the fourth-largest company in the world, but its market capitalization is about $1 trillion behind that of Nvidia. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that the Google owner’s value will rise faster than the chipmaker in the future.

At the heart of Alphabet is Google Search, and although Google is under regulatory pressure, it is unlikely to lose its title as the world’s most popular search engine, ensuring that Google remains a key part of marketers’ advertising budgets.

Importantly, artificial intelligence assistants like ChatGPT or OpenAI’s Meta AI are not as big a threat as investors once feared. Google has used its own AI, based on its Gemini LLM, to provide direct answers to many search queries and link to relevant sources. Management says its AI overviews are driving increased search usage and higher user satisfaction. The company is also using AI to support new search methods, including recording video with your phone or circling content in an app or on a webpage. Both of these should lead to increased usage.

But AI has the potential to significantly grow Google’s cloud platform. Last quarter, quarterly revenue exceeded the $10 billion mark for the first time. Google is winning many well-known customers, including Apple, for its AI development platform on Google Cloud. At the same time, the Gemini for Workspace software is helping to increase average revenue per user and attract new customers.

Alphabet is certainly spending a lot of money to acquire these customers. The company expects to spend about $50 billion on capital expenditures this year, mostly on servers and data centers. But the return could be huge because the company is investing in AI development ahead of demand. Google Cloud can become a much bigger part of the business and be a good complement to the search business.

With shares trading at just 22 times forward earnings, there’s room for several expansions. This is especially true when you consider that the company’s bottom line should show very high growth due to significant share buybacks supported by Alphabet’s massive annual free cash flow. It’s actually surprising that investors don’t already value Alphabet higher than Nvidia.