AI Stocks Are Still Hot. Here Are 4 With Room to Grow.

By AltIndex Research · 7 min read · August 16, 6:44 pm

Memory stocks led the market again last week, with SanDisk up 35%. The AI trade is still working, but our data says the growth signals have already moved on from the names that ran hardest. Here are four AI stocks where those signals are still accelerating.

AltIndex Research | August 2026 | WDC, MRVL, ALAB, CBRS, SNDK, MU

Last week was a good week for AI stocks, and a volatile one. Ten days ago SanDisk fell 9.2% in a single session, on results that beat. Micron fell 11% in the last week of July.

Which raises the question we keep getting in August: are AI stocks still hot, or is this the top? Our data says the trade is intact and the winners have rotated. The two stocks that led the memory rally are cooling on the signals we track, while four names one layer over, Western Digital, Marvell, Astera Labs and Cerebras, are showing accelerating growth signals.

SanDisk and Micron Already Made Their Move

SanDisk's run is one of the great ones, up 3,415% from a year ago, and we flagged it early when our Reddit alerts caught the retail attention spike ahead of the first leg. What has changed is underneath. SanDisk's job postings fell 24.5% in a month to 276, down from 328 in February, and employee business outlook has been stuck at 44% for nine straight months. Fewer than half of SanDisk's own staff expect the business to improve, which is a strange foundation for a stock at 34 times last year's price.

Micron is another strong AI stock. The stock's AI Score crossed 60 in October 2025, when the stock averaged $200. It has averaged $881 this month.

AltIndex AI Score and price data, February 2025 to August 2026

Micron still scores 66 and headcount is up 26.7% year over year to 41,457. What has turned is velocity: job postings peaked at 2,986 in May and have fallen 23.8% to 1,922, while employee outlook has held flat at 75% since February. Both stocks are still working. But there are more AI stocks with more promising signals.

Where the Growth Signals Point Now

Western Digital (WDC), score 74. The forgotten half of the memory trade after the SanDisk separation, and the cheapest way to own it at 20 times earnings. Job postings bottomed at 117 in August 2025 and have climbed to 304, up 488% year over year and up 12.3% in the past month. Employee business outlook has risen almost every month for two years, from 48% to 64%.

Marvell Technology (MRVL), score 72. Custom AI silicon and the interconnect that moves data between accelerators and storage. Job postings hit 418 in August, up 75% in a month and 235% year over year, the sharpest hiring acceleration of any large-cap chip name we track. Employee business outlook is 91%, up from 78% in March 2025. The stock trades at $222 against a June average of $282, so the price has cooled while the hiring has not. Two members of Congress bought it in the last 90 days, visible on our congressional trading data.

Astera Labs (ALAB), score 74. Connectivity silicon for AI racks, which is the bottleneck once the memory and the GPUs are in place. LinkedIn headcount has doubled in a year, from 589 to 1,198, and job postings are up 66% year over year. At 95%, its employee business outlook is the highest of any company in this article.

Cerebras (CBRS), score 74. The pure inference-compute bet, and the newest listing here. Job postings nearly doubled in a month to 126, headcount went from 892 to 1,017 since May, and web traffic crossed one million monthly visits in July, up 28.7%. The stock trades at $219, below its May average of $267.

The Bear Case

Start with what you are paying. Astera Labs trades at 158 times earnings and Cerebras at 592. Those multiples only work if revenue compounds for years without stumbling, and a single quarter of slower growth can cut them in half. Western Digital and SanDisk look cheap at roughly 20 times, but that number is built on gross margins above 70% that exist because memory supply is tight right now. NAND has never held margins like that for long. When manufacturers add capacity, prices fall, and 20 times earnings becomes 60 times earnings without the stock moving at all.

August 6 showed the second risk clearly. Both companies beat and guided above estimates, and Western Digital still fell 14.6% in a day. When a stock has tripled or quintupled in a year, good results are already in the price, and the only thing left to trade on is disappointment.

The hiring data has a limit too. Job postings tell you what management expects, not what customers ordered. Marvell's postings jumped 75% in a month, which is a strong signal and also a single month. We would want to see it hold through the next two prints before treating it as a trend.

The Bottom Line

AI stocks are still hot, and the memory rally is the evidence rather than the exception. What has changed is that the reprice already happened in the most obvious names, and the hiring data at both SanDisk and Micron rolled over on the way.

If you want exposure to the same inference buildout with growth signals still pointing up, Western Digital is the value version at 20 times earnings with job postings up 488% and employee outlook rising for two straight years. Marvell, Astera Labs and Cerebras are the expensive versions, and all three are hiring faster than they were three months ago with 86% to 95% of their staff expecting the business to improve.

Disclosure: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. AltIndex aggregates publicly available alternative data signals. Past signal performance does not guarantee future results. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.