The Best Stocks to Invest $50,000 in Right Now
February 9, 2025
If you suddenly inherited $50,000, and you didn’t have some short-term expense that needed paying off, you might be inclined to look for someplace to invest it and perhaps grow it into something bigger. $50K is a lot of money to invest all in one place, so a safer bet would be to spread it out across several stocks. These stocks should be attractively valued with strong growth rates that can outperform a major market index such as the S&P 500 over the next five to 10 years. You want that $50K to increase in value, right?
If you $50,000 that isn’t needed right away, there are opportunities out there to help it grow. For example, some recent volatility in the technology sector has created several good buying opportunities. Technology is changing the world we live in, and investing in quality companies that are leading the charge is a solid long-term investment strategy.
Let’s look at three technology stocks investors with a $50,000 windfall can consider investing in right now that are both growing quickly and have attractive valuations.
1. Nvidia
Nvidia (NVDA 0.90%) shares took a hit earlier this year after Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek introduced an AI software model that rivaled that of competitors like ChatGPT but was produced for far less expense and using less hardware than competitors’ models. The actual cost to build the model (reportedly less than $6 million) has come into question, and there is no sign of large tech companies slowing down their AI infrastructure spending. In fact, all indications are that AI infrastructure spending is only going to increase this year.
This can be seen in the growing capital expenditure (capex) budgets of large hyperscale tech companies. For example, Microsoft has said it will spend $80 billion building out data centers this year. Typically, about half of that spending would go toward servers. Meta Platforms, meanwhile increased its capex budget this year to between $60 billion to $65 billion, up from the $39.2 billion in 2024, while Alphabet (GOOGL -3.27%) (GOOG -3.19%) will increase its capex to $75 billion from $52.5 billion last year.
Nvidia remains the dominant player in providing graphic processing units (GPUs) to help power the training for AI models and running inference, and as such is the company best positioned to benefit from this increased AI infrastructure spending. It has created a wide moat through its CUDA software platform, which allows developers to easily program its chips for various AI tasks.
Meanwhile, the stock is attractively priced, trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of under 23 times 2025 analyst estimates and a price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio of under 0.5, with PEG ratios of under 1 considered undervalued.
Image source: Getty Images.
2. Alphabet
The sell-off following Alphabet’s Q4 earnings release on Feb. 4 opened up a nice buying opportunity in what was already one of the cheapest megacap tech stocks out there. The company reported strong results, with particular strength across its Search, YouTube, and Google Cloud businesses. However, capacity constraints led its cloud computing unit to grow revenue by only 30%, which was short of expectations.
That said, the company is aggressively spending to build out its cloud computing capacity, and the business has seen a big profitability inflection point, with Google Cloud operating income soaring 142% from $864 million to $2.09 billion last quarter. Alphabet has also developed its own custom AI chips called TPUs (tensor processing units) with the help of Broadcom which can improve inference times and are more cost-efficient. This should help the unit continue to show strong operating leverage, with profits growing faster than revenue.
With Alphabet, investors are getting five market-leading businesses with at least $30 billion annual revenue run rates each (Search, YouTube ad-supported, Google Cloud, subscriptions, and its third-party ad network), as well as emerging business such as its robotaxi unit Waymo and quantum computing. The company has also invested heavily in AI outside of cloud computing with its leading Gemini 2.0 model, which it plans to incorporate throughout its businesses.
Alphabet stock is very attractively priced, trading at only 21 times earnings based on 2025 analyst estimates.
3. GitLab
A bit more off the radar, GitLab (GTLB -1.26%) operates a fast-growing DevSecOps platform that helps developers create software in a secure environment. The company is a big AI beneficiary, as customers clamor for its AI-powered GitLab Duo add-on, which can help a programmer complete a coding assignment by offering coding suggestions. Meanwhile, its GitLab Duo Workflow offering is an autonomous AI agent that can help plan and prioritize tasks as well as suggest architectural optimizations and proactively identify opportunities for code refactoring.
GitLab’s AI offerings have helped the company consistently grow its revenue by between 30% to 40% in each of the past six quarters. It has seen both its number of customers grow, up 16% year over year in Q3, and existing customers spend more money on its service. This can be seen in its very high net revenue retention rate of 124% last quarter, which is even stronger than the 120% net revenue retention Palantir Technologies saw in Q4.
Despite the company’s strong growth and high gross margins of nearly 90%, the stock has been trading flat over the past year. Given that GitLab is essentially a software-as-a-service (Saas) platform, the best way to typically value this type of company would be using a price-to-sale (P/S) multiple, given the high margin and recurring nature of this business.
On this front, GitLab trades at 10 times 2025 analyst sales estimates. That is not expensive for a company growing its revenue between 30% to 40%. By comparison, Palantir grew its revenue by 36% last quarter and trades at a P/S multiple of 52 times 2025 analyst estimates, while CrowdStrike, which grew revenue by 29% last quarter, trades at a P/S multiple of over 17.5 times fiscal 2026 estimates (ending January 2026).
GitLab is one of the cheaper high-growth stocks out there and has a continued strong opportunity in front of it.
Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet and GitLab. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, CrowdStrike, GitLab, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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