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The AI Infrastructure Trade: How Our BullsEye Top 10 Returned +116.69% in 12 Months
- GrowthTech.ai
- Aug 5
- 13 min read
The best AI stock picks of 2026 weren't a lucky guess — they were a ranking. On August 1, 2025, our BullsEye Market Intelligence System surfaced ten stocks. By August 3, 2026, the average was up +116.69%. A $10,000 position spread evenly across all ten would have finished at roughly $21,669 — with one name up 430%, nine of ten in the green, and exactly one loser we're publishing right alongside the winners.
The top five averaged +173.32%. Ranks six through ten averaged +60.07%. Strip out the single best performer — Seagate — and the remaining nine still averaged +81.88%. That's the point of a system: the returns don't hinge on one lottery ticket.
The Scoreboard: One Year, Ten Stocks, +116.69% Average
BullsEye Rank | Stock | Price 8/1/2025 | Price 8/3/2026 | 1-Year Return |
1 | IES Holdings (IESC) | $359.78 | $724.99 | +101.51% |
2 | Seagate Technology (STX) | $156.79 | $831.06 | +430.05% |
3 | SentinelOne (S) | $18.07 | $20.05 | +10.96% |
4 | TeraWulf (WULF) | $4.83 | $18.83 | +289.86% |
5 | Broadcom (AVGO) | $292.20 | $392.23 | +34.23% |
6 | Alphabet (GOOG) | $191.18 | $372.47 | +94.83% |
7 | Canadian Banc Corp (TSX: BK) | C$9.32 | C$16.98 | +82.19% |
8 | Dave Inc. (DAVE) | $234.75 | $399.15 | +70.03% |
9 | The Carlyle Group (CG) | $59.22 | $48.91 | −17.41% |
10 | Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) | $237.91 | $406.11 | +70.70% |
Top 5 average | +173.32% | |||
Ranks 6–10 average | +60.07% | |||
All ten average | +116.69% |
Here's what actually drove each one.
1. IES Holdings (NASDAQ: IESC) — +101.51%
IESC is one of the purest listed ways to own the electrical guts of an AI data center, and fiscal 2026 is when that thesis went from "story" to "backlog."
The company closed fiscal 2025 (September year-end) with revenue of $3.37 billion, up 17%, and net income of $306 million, up 40%. It kept buying capacity rather than paying it out: Gulf Island Fabrication was announced in November 2025 and closed in January 2026 for roughly $192 million in equity value, followed by Broadwind's Abilene, Texas production facility for up to $19.5 million in spring 2026. S&P added IESC to the MidCap 400 effective July 1, 2026, worth a reported 7.6% pop on the announcement alone.
Then came July 31. Fiscal Q3 revenue landed at $1.243 billion, up 40% — an acceleration from the prior 16–17% run rate — against roughly $1.08 billion expected. Adjusted EPS of $6.70 crushed the $4.51 consensus. Backlog nearly doubled to $4.5 billion, up 91%. Communications grew 51%, Commercial & Industrial 109%, Infrastructure Solutions 73%, while the legacy Residential segment shrank 6%. That mix shift pushed gross margin to 27.4%. The stock closed +29.74% that day, and the board approved a 2-for-1 split. Roughly 40 percentage points of the full-year return arrived in the final two sessions — on a balance sheet carrying zero debt.
2. Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX) — +430.05%
The single best pick of the cohort, and it wasn't a cyclical earnings beat — it was a structural re-rating of a business the market had priced as a dying commodity.
AI data centers need nearline storage, and the hard drive industry cannot build it fast enough. Seagate's fiscal 2026 revenue hit $12.2 billion, up 34%, with growth accelerating every quarter from +21% to +48.5%. More striking: GAAP gross margin went from 37.4% to 52.3%, and GAAP operating margin from 23.2% to 43.0%, in five quarters. Long-term agreements converted a historically deflationary product into a contracted, price-inflating one — nearline capacity is locked through 2028, with customers already negotiating 2029 allocations, and management said buyers were taking incremental capacity above contract rates. HAMR/Mozaic drives reached 40% of nearline exabytes.
Wall Street chased it the whole way. Morgan Stanley's June 16, 2026 call — that the shortage persists to at least 2028, with demand growing 40–50% against 30–35% supply — took its target to $1,035 and sent the stock above $1,090. Seagate peaked near $1,145 intraday on June 18 before an AI-capex-glut scare knocked it 25%+ lower. The July 28 print steadied it: revenue $3.63 billion, adjusted EPS $5.71, nearline shipments of 195 exabytes up 43%, and September-quarter guidance of $4.1 billion and $7.30 against roughly $3.78 billion and $5.86 expected. Even after a 25% drawdown, the year finished +430%.
3. SentinelOne (NYSE: S) — +10.96%
Every honest track record includes the ones that grind. SentinelOne is ours, and the +11% flatters a rough ride: the stock fell 32.4% over calendar 2025, bottomed near $11.81 in April 2026, and only clawed back in the final two months.
Two things worked against it. First, the entry price already carried a takeover premium — a July 2025 report that Palo Alto Networks was in talks at $8–10 billion had spiked the shares days before the window opened, and no deal ever materialized. That premium bled out over the following months. Second, growth decelerated and never re-accelerated: revenue growth ran +22%, +23%, +20%, +21%, ARR growth +24% down to +23%, and $100k+ customer growth slid from +23% to +17%. Two separate quarters were "beat the print, miss the guide" events — December 4, 2025, made worse by the CFO's retirement announced on the same call, and May 29, 2026, when a revenue miss, 300bps of gross margin compression, and an 8% workforce reduction took the stock down double digits intraday.
What rescued it was a July 2026 re-rating off a deeply depressed base: a Scotiabank upgrade, AWS Security Hub and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore integrations, the first sustained non-GAAP operating profitability, and "emerging solutions" reaching half of total ARR. Revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time. The system flagged the platform; the market made us wait.
4. TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) — +289.86%
WULF's near-quadruple is one of the cleanest business-model conversions of the year: a bitcoin miner turned hyperscaler-backstopped AI landlord in twelve months.
The trigger was August 14, 2025. TeraWulf signed two ten-year AI hosting agreements with Fluidstack covering 200+ MW of critical IT load at Lake Mariner — roughly $3.7 billion of contracted revenue, up to $8.7 billion with extensions — with Google backstopping $1.8 billion of the lease obligations and taking warrants for about 8% of the company. Four days later, a 160 MW expansion took contracted revenue to $6.7 billion and Google's pro forma stake to roughly 14%. In October, a 168 MW Abernathy, Texas joint venture added roughly $9.5 billion over 25 years with another $1.3 billion Google backstop.
Then came the land grab: Cayuga (up to 400 MW), Hawesville KY and Morgantown MD in February 2026, and a 1 GW Eastern Kentucky campus in May. By February the company reported 522 MW contracted and $12.8 billion of contracted revenue. The capstone landed July 6, 2026 — a 20-year, ~401 MW lease with Anthropic worth roughly $19 billion, alongside the sale of its Abernathy JV majority at a premium.
The market paid for backlog, not earnings: FY2025 revenue was just $168.5 million and losses ballooned on warrant marks. Dilution was heavy — $900 million of stock at $19.00, plus billions in converts and secured notes — and New York's July 2026 data center permitting moratorium knocked 7% off in a session. The stock still finished ~37% below its high, and ~290% above its start.
5. Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) — +34.23%
Broadcom's fundamentals were the best in the group. Its stock return was merely good — and the gap between those two facts is the whole lesson.
AI semiconductor revenue went from $5.2 billion a quarter (+63%) to $10.8 billion a quarter (+143%). Fiscal 2025 revenue hit $63.9 billion, up 24%. In December 2025 management disclosed an AI order backlog above $73 billion inside a $162 billion consolidated backlog, and raised the dividend 10% for a fifteenth straight annual increase. The customer roster expanded from three custom-accelerator accounts to six: OpenAI's 10-gigawatt collaboration announced October 13, 2025; an $11 billion Anthropic follow-on; Meta's MTIA scaling toward 3 GW; Google's multi-generational TPU commitment. Q2 FY2026 revenue was a record $22.2 billion, up 48%, with September-quarter guidance of $29.4 billion.
So why only +34%? Because virtually all of it was banked by early June. AVGO closed at an all-time high of $494.78 on June 3, 2026 — then fell 12.6% the next day, shedding roughly $280 billion in market value, because management reiterated rather than raised the $100 billion FY2027 AI target, acknowledged Google would likely multi-source its custom silicon, and missed on the high-margin infrastructure software line. A July 8 Apple agreement worth over $30 billion for 15 billion U.S.-made chips helped, but the stock finished about 21% below its peak. Extraordinary execution, expectations reset.
6. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) — +94.83%
Alphabet nearly doubled on a two-stage re-rating, and stage one was legal.
On September 2, 2025, Judge Amit Mehta declined to force divestiture of Chrome or Android, ruling that "plaintiffs overreached." Google must end exclusive default distribution deals and share search index data, but Apple's default arrangement survived. The stock jumped 7.5%, and Alphabet crossed a $3 trillion market cap within two weeks.
Stage two was Alphabet simply winning the AI argument. Gemini 3 launched November 18 to record benchmark scores. Berkshire Hathaway's $4.93 billion stake surfaced a day earlier, sending shares up 5.1%. The October Anthropic agreement — up to one million TPUs and well over 1 GW of capacity — plus reported Meta TPU talks reframed Google silicon from an internal cost center into a merchant threat. Alphabet hit $4 trillion on January 12, 2026.
Then the financials caught up violently. Google Cloud accelerated 34% → 48% → 63% → 82% across four quarters, with backlog running $155B → $240B → $460B+ → $514 billion. Q1 2026 EPS rose 82%; Q2 revenue hit $119.8 billion, up 24%. The pushback was funding: 2026 capex guidance climbed to $195–205 billion, buybacks were switched off entirely in both Q1 and Q2, and the company raised $80 billion in equity in June — including a $10 billion Berkshire private placement. Fittingly, the window's final day was a +4.44% move on a Morgan Stanley note defending the capex.
7. Canadian Banc Corp (TSX: BK) — +82.19%
Our one non-U.S. name, and a reminder that leverage cuts both ways — this year it cut in our favor.
BK isn't a bank. It's the Class A share of a Quadravest-managed split-share corporation holding the six Canadian banks — Royal, TD, BMO, CIBC, Scotiabank and National Bank — with selective covered-call writing. Because the C$10 preferred claim ahead of it is fixed, every dollar the underlying portfolio gains accrues entirely to Class A. At the start of the window that structure implied roughly 2.5–3x gearing to the bank portfolio.
The banks delivered. Canadian financials led the S&P/TSX to record highs through May 2026, with Royal Bank up roughly 47% and TD roughly 62% over the trailing year, against a Bank of Canada that finished cutting and parked policy at 2.25%. Management compounded it three ways: two 10% Class A stock dividends (September 2025 and May 2026) that raised total distributions without cutting the per-share rate; two accretive treasury preferred offerings (~C$62.7 million in October 2025 and C$103.3 million in June 2026) that grew the asset base while the floating preferred coupon stayed cheap; and a distribution policy targeting 15% annualized that ratchets the monthly payout up as the price rises — from C$0.159 in August 2025 to C$0.189 by June 2026. Reported NAV per unit reached C$27.64 in July 2026.
Important: the +82.19% is a total return in Canadian dollars on a split- and distribution-adjusted basis. The raw traded price moved roughly C$12.73 to C$17.05, about +34%; the balance came from the two stock dividends and reinvested cash distributions.
8. Dave Inc. (NASDAQ: DAVE) — +70.03%
Four straight beat-and-raise quarters where the unit economics improved on every axis at once — which is rarer than it sounds.
Revenue growth held in a 47–64% band all year, finishing fiscal 2025 at $554.2 million, up 60%, with adjusted EBITDA of $226.7 million, up 162%. But the real story was credit: the 28-day delinquency rate fell from 2.40% to a record-low 1.69% while ExtraCash originations grew 37–51% every quarter, and net monetization hit a four-year high of 5.1%. Adjusted EPS guidance jumped from $14.00–15.00 to $16.25–16.75 within two months.
Management stacked capital-structure catalysts on top: the buyback authorization went from $125 million to $300 million, roughly $195 million was repurchased in Q1 2026 alone — about 7% of shares outstanding — funded partly by a $175 million zero-coupon convertible with a capped call struck at $421.34. Dave joined the S&P SmallCap 600 on June 1, and began funding ExtraCash originations through Coastal Community Bank in June, freeing over $200 million of balance-sheet liquidity.
Notably, the two biggest beats each saw the stock fall on the day. The +70% came from a sustained June–July re-rating, when Benchmark went to $475 and KBW to $485 and the stock printed successive 12-month highs. The regulatory overhang — an FTC/DOJ matter still pending, plus a Baltimore suit filed December 30, 2025 — never resolved. It simply stopped mattering to the multiple.
9. The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG) — −17.41%
We publish everything, including this one.
Carlyle didn't break. The sector it sits in did. CG actually rose about 15% after the ranking, hitting an all-time closing high of $67.95 on September 18, 2025 — then fell roughly 28% from that peak over the next ten months.
The trigger was the private-credit scare. Tricolor and First Brands failed in September 2025. Jamie Dimon's "when you see one cockroach, there are probably more" landed in October. Blue Owl restricted withdrawals in November and again in April 2026. By March 2026, roughly $265 billion of alternative-manager market cap had been wiped out from peaks, with peers down 41–67%. Carlyle's own semi-liquid credit vehicle, CTAC, was hit with 15.7% redemption requests on April 9, 2026, and management conceded on the Q1 call that the pressure would "persist for a little while."
Company-specific damage compounded it. Q1 2026 on May 7 was the genuinely bad quarter: distributable earnings of $0.89 missed the $1.00 consensus on unrealized performance-allocation reversals in Carlyle Partners VII, a $132 million GAAP net loss, and fee-related earnings declining 3.2% — the weakest fee growth among peers. CFRA cut to Sell the next day; RBC downgraded three days later. The stock bottomed at $41.51 in June on about 12x forward earnings versus a five-year average near 20x. February's investor day — targeting $1.9B+ FRE, $200B+ inflows and $6.00+ DE per share by 2028, plus a $2 billion buyback — didn't stop the slide.
The cruel footnote: Carlyle's record Q2 2026, with distributable earnings of $1.07 against $0.94 expected and its best quarter in nearly four years, was reported on August 5, 2026 — two days after this window closed. It contributed nothing to the −17.41%.
10. Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE: TSM) — +70.70%
The cleanest fundamental story in the group, and a useful lesson about paying for growth.
Revenue growth accelerated all year while margins expanded: gross margin climbed from 59.5% to a record 67.7% in Q2 2026, HPC went from 55% to 66% of total revenue, and Q2 revenue hit $40.2 billion, up 36%, with EPS up 77.4%. TSMC raised its 2026 growth outlook twice — from roughly 30% in January to "slightly above 40%" in July. June was a record month at NT$442.7 billion, up 67.9%, breaking a four-year seasonal pattern. Two Goldman Sachs target hikes bracketed the move: the January 5 raise pushed TSMC to a record high and past a $1.2 trillion market cap, and the July 4 raise to a $600 ADR target came as reports circulated of 5–15% price hikes across advanced nodes.
Policy flipped from tail risk to tailwind — TSMC was exempted from the threatened 100% chip tariff in August 2025, and January's US–Taiwan trade framework explicitly rewarded US-investing chipmakers, turning Arizona from a margin drag into a tariff shield.
The nuance matters: TSM peaked near $479 and finished the window around $406, roughly 15% off its high. That wasn't demand. On July 16 the company posted its best quarter ever and simultaneously raised capex to $60–64 billion, added $100 billion to Arizona (US total: $265 billion), and guided margins down 3–4 points on the N2 ramp. The stock fell 7.3% the next day. As CEO C.C. Wei put it, "our packaging capacity is so tight that now it's limiting my customers' growth." The constraint is no longer demand — it's CoWoS.
The next Top 10 ranking is already live.
Ten stocks. One year. +116.69% average. Nine winners, one loser, published together.
The BullsEye Market Intelligence System doesn't chase headlines and it doesn't wait for a narrative to become obvious. It ranks. Then it publishes the results — all of them.
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The Bottom Line
The 2025–26 window rewarded one specific thing: owning the physical and financial infrastructure of the AI buildout before the market finished repricing it. Seagate's drives, IES Holdings' switchgear, TeraWulf's megawatts, Broadcom's accelerators, TSMC's packaging, Alphabet's TPUs. The system found six of those before they were consensus.
It also put us in a private-credit manager that lost 17%, and a cybersecurity platform that went nowhere for ten months. That's what a real track record looks like.
Systematic, data-driven market intelligence. Not headlines. Not hype. Not guesswork.
Risk Disclaimer
GrowthTech.ai does not give out individual financial or investment advice, act as a personal financial, legal, or institutional investment advisor, or publicly or privately promote the purchase or sale of any security, investment, or the adoption of any specific financial strategy. All information on or from the website should be viewed as educational and informational for your own due-diligence purposes and shall not be viewed as financial advice in any security. Additionally, the AI analytics system does not take into account elements like your trading background, individual aims and ambitions, financial situation, or risk tolerance. All forms of investing, stock signals, and investment plans carry the possibility of losing part or perhaps all of your initial investment. Figures reflect a specific window (August 1, 2025 – August 3, 2026). U.S. figures are price-only returns that exclude dividends, fees, taxes, and timing differences. The TSX-listed holding (BK) is quoted in Canadian dollars and reflects a total return adjusted for two 10% stock dividends and reinvested distributions; currency movement is not accounted for. Past performance does not guarantee future results. You should always get advice from a licensed financial counselor prior to implementing any financial plans.
Sources
IES Holdings fiscal 2025 full-year and fiscal Q3 2026 results, $4.5B backlog, Gulf Island Fabrication acquisition, S&P MidCap 400 inclusion — IES Holdings investor relations / GlobeNewswire and S&P Global press releases, November 2025–July 2026
Seagate Technology fiscal Q3 2026 and fiscal Q4 2026 results, nearline pricing and long-term agreements, HAMR/Mozaic ramp, fiscal Q1 2027 guidance — Seagate investor relations / Business Wire and Morgan Stanley analyst commentary, October 2025–July 2026
SentinelOne fiscal Q3 2026 through fiscal Q1 2027 results, CFO transition and guidance reset, May 2026 restructuring — SentinelOne investor relations / Business Wire and Reuters, August 2025–July 2026
TeraWulf Fluidstack and Google hosting agreements, Abernathy joint venture, Anthropic lease at Justified Data Campus, FY2025 results — TeraWulf investor relations and SEC filings / Data Center Dynamics, August 2025–July 2026
Broadcom fiscal Q3 2025 through fiscal Q2 2026 results, AI order backlog disclosure, OpenAI 10-gigawatt collaboration, Apple manufacturing agreement — Broadcom investor relations and earnings call transcripts / Apple Newsroom, September 2025–July 2026
Alphabet Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 results, search antitrust remedies ruling, Google Cloud backlog and capex guidance, $80B equity raise, Anthropic TPU agreement — Alphabet investor relations and SEC filings / CNBC and Google Cloud press, September 2025–August 2026
Canadian Banc Corp Class A share splits, monthly distribution declarations, preferred share treasury offerings, fund NAV and portfolio composition — Quadravest Capital Management and GlobeNewswire; Bank of Canada rate decisions, August 2025–July 2026
Dave Inc. Q2 2025 through Q1 2026 results, convertible note offering and buyback authorization, S&P SmallCap 600 inclusion, Coastal Community Bank origination transfer — Dave Inc. investor relations / GlobeNewswire and FTC case docket, August 2025–July 2026
The Carlyle Group Q4 2025 and Q1 2026 results, CTAC redemption requests, private-credit sector de-rating, RBC Capital downgrade — Carlyle investor relations / Wall Street Journal and Fortune, September 2025–July 2026
Taiwan Semiconductor Q3 2025 through Q2 2026 results, 2026 capex and Arizona expansion, monthly revenue disclosures, Goldman Sachs target revisions, US–Taiwan trade framework — TSMC investor relations and monthly revenue reports / Bloomberg and Reuters, October 2025–July 2026
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