By Paul R. La Monica
Alphabet may have pulled ahead of OpenAI in the battle for artificial-intelligence supremacy. But Alphabet, whose stock has surged more than 15% in just the past month thanks to the launch of its Gemini 3 AI model, isn't the only company that stands to benefit from the shifting tides in AI.
Jordi Visser, a senior managing director for 22V Research, said in a report last week that the rise of so-called Vision Language Models, which can process and learn from images and video as well as text, should be great news for Tesla, thanks to its focus on robotics. Traditional energy and utility companies stand to gain as well, he wrote.
The reason? More enhanced AI functionality will require even more power. That means companies such as the gas-turbine leader GE Vernova and electrical components maker Eaton, which Barron's has written about as industrial winners from the AI boom, could also be good bets.
"The next phase of AI isn't about more datacenters, it's about power infrastructure, flexible demand, and physical-world automation," Visser wrote. He added that individual investors have already caught on to this trend, as evidenced by Alphabet's rally as well as a recent pop in Tesla, which is up nearly 11% in the past two weeks.
"Retail saw it first," he wrote. "Institutions are being dragged there next."
Visser elaborated on his analysis in a YouTube video, arguing that current AI leaders like the chip company Nvidia and cloud-computing firm CoreWeave, along with OpenAI, may not remain on top as the market shifts more toward VLMs over large language models.
Nvidia, for example, is down nearly 10% in the past month as Alphabet has rallied. "There will be different winners," he said.
The healthcare sector will be another big beneficiary of AI, Visser believes. He argued that AI should lead to pharmaceutical and biotech companies being able to eliminate more diseases as testing and research becomes more efficient.
"Drug discovery is just one part," Visser said in the video, noting that AI can lead to lower medical costs and longer life spans thanks to the "confluence of gene therapy, robotics and diagnostics accelerating." Visser also pointed out that the AI start-up Anthropic, the developer of the Claude LLM, has been hiring more life science researchers as of late.
Investors have taken notice too. Pharma and biotech stocks have shown recent signs of life after lagging behind Big Tech and the broader market for most of this year. Part of the problem has been worry about crackdowns on drug pricing and regulation from President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The State Street SPDR S&P Pharmaceuticals and State Street SPDR S&P Biotech exchange-traded funds are up 9.5% and 13%, respectively, in the past month. "The market has spoken," Visser said.
Of course, the market could change its mind. Shares of Microsoft, which has a big investment in OpenAI, outperformed Alphabet for most of this year. But Alphabet's stock has picked up steam in the past three months.
And Nvidia was still the top-performing Magnificent Seven stock as recently as early November. Fortunes can change quickly: Today's winners may not be Wall Street's AI darlings a few months from now.
Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 03, 2025 15:53 ET (20:53 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments