Investors have struggled with volatility as they fear disruption from artificial intelligence across a range of sectors. But if you look beneath the surface, there are many attractive opportunities.
Long-term investors can ignore the ongoing noise and follow the recommendations of top Wall Street analysts who consider multiple aspects and conduct thorough research before assigning a buy rating to a stock.
Here are three stocks favored by some of Wall Street’s top pros, according to TipRanks, a platform that ranks analysts based on their past performance.
Data dog
Artificial intelligence-based observability and security platform Data dog (DDOG) is this week’s first pick. Following the company’s Investor Day event on February 12, Baird analyst William Power reiterated his Buy rating on Datadog stock with a price target of $180. The analyst said that while Datadog did not provide new long-term guidance at the event, the company continues to target adjusted operating margin above 25%, reflecting a balanced approach between investing in future growth and near-term profitability.
Power saw solid demand for Datadog’s existing products and growing opportunities in AI, protocols, developer tools and security. He added that given Datadog’s notable lead in contextual data compared to its competitors, the company is well positioned to help businesses as AI increases complexity within IT stacks.
The five-star analyst believes Datadog has the ability to meet enterprise security needs, supported by its broad observability platform and significant data insights. Power emphasized that while the company currently has approximately 8,500 security customers, including 70% of customers with annual recurring revenue (ARR) over $1 million, security only accounts for 2% of the total ARR of these large customers, reflecting the tremendous expansion opportunity.
“We remain positive about the company’s leadership position in the observability market, the continued success of its land and expansion activities, and the long-term opportunities in new products (particularly security),” Power said.
Power ranks No. 459 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. Its valuations were profitable 55% of the time and delivered an average return of 15.8%. See Datadog ownership structure on TipRanks.
Vertiv Holdings
AI infrastructure company Vertiv Holdings (VRT) provides power and cooling solutions for data centers. VRT recently rebounded after the company reported positive Q4 2025 results, with organic orders rising 252%.
Citing solid order growth and insights from Vertiv’s 10-K filing, Bank of America analyst Andrew Obin reiterated his Buy rating on VRT stock and raised his price target to $277 from $250.
Obin emphasized that the company expects the strong order momentum to continue into 2026. “It would be an impressive achievement to grow beyond the $17.8 billion in orders in 2025 (+81% organic YoY),” the analyst said.
He noted CEO Giordano Albertazzi’s comment that the pipeline would not be exhausted even after many large orders in the fourth quarter of 2025. Obin expects Vertiv orders to grow 5% to $18.6 billion in 2026. The analyst explained that even this modest year-over-year growth will result in significantly positive backlog statistics. Specifically, order growth of 5% would increase the backlog by $5 billion (up 33% year over year). For the first quarter of 2026, Obin forecasts order intake of $4.3 billion (+52% organic growth year-over-year).
Among the key takeaways from the 10-K filing, Obin highlighted that Vertiv mentioned three new trends in addition to tariff and economic uncertainty, AI and thermal product expansion: strengthening service capabilities, strategic deals with Nvidia (NVDA) and caterpillar (CAT) and pre-built product development.
Obin is ranked #87 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. Its valuations were profitable 70% of the time and delivered an average return of 19.2%. See Vertiv Holdings stats on TipRanks.
Arista Networks
Finally, let’s take a look Arista Networks (ANET), which provides networking solutions for large-scale AI and data center environments. The company impressed investors with above-average fourth-quarter results and provided strong guidance.
Following ANET stock’s decline in response to the announcement that Nvidia will supply GPUs, CPUs and networking solutions to Meta Platforms (META), Needham analyst Ryan Koontz said he expects the deal to have “little to no impact” on Arista’s solid supplier position at Meta. Koontz reiterated his Buy rating on ANET shares with a price target of $185. It’s worth noting that the analyst had recently raised his price target on Arista shares from $165 to $185.
Koontz emphasized that the Meta Platforms-Nvidia deal is a concern because Arista is a key network supplier to the social media company. The analyst estimates that Meta accounted for 16% of Arista’s revenue in 2025. Based on multiple industry reviews following the deal’s announcement, Koontz continues to view ANET as a “dominant” provider for Metaplatforms for its AI backend spine and scale-across applications.
“Our reviews show that the majority of NVDA network sales have been and will continue to be to Meta NICs [network interface cards] connecting the NVDA xPUs to a first layer of Spectrum-X switches supported by the ANET Spine and Scale Across networks,” noted Koontz.
The five-star analyst added that the announcement does not reflect any significant innovations in the networking space and is actually a follow-up to a similar announcement in October 2025 from the Open Compute Project (OCP) conference, when Nvidia announced that Meta would deploy Spectrum-X.
Koontz is ranked #277 among more than 12,100 analysts tracked by TipRanks. Its valuations were profitable 51% of the time and delivered an average return of 24.7%. View Arista Networks financials on TipRanks.