The Invisible Plumbing of the AI Boom: 2 Infrastructure Stocks to Watch
2 AI Infrastructure Stocks Fueling the 2026 Economy
Every massive technological revolution follows a predictable psychological pattern. First comes the era of sheer wonder. We stare at the screen, mesmerized by the new capabilities. Next comes the era of frantic speculation, where investors throw capital at any company with the right buzzwords in its pitch deck. Finally, the dust settles, the hype fades, and the era of real-world utility begins.
As we push through the first quarter of 2026, artificial intelligence has definitively entered this third phase. We have moved past the “chatbot era.” The market is no longer rewarding promises of generalized artificial intelligence; it is demanding execution, profitability, and integration.
If you are evaluating your portfolio and looking for sustainable AI-driven investments, you have to ask yourself a fundamental question: Are you investing in the prospectors, or are you investing in the shovels?
The most lucrative opportunities in tech right now are not found in consumer-facing applications. They are found in the essential architecture—the invisible pipes, shields, and networks that allow the AI economy to function. The AI economy growth we are witnessing today requires massive transactional trust and uninhibited data accessibility.
Let us look at two fundamentally distinct AI infrastructure stocks that provide the “trust” and the “fuel” for the modern digital economy. Both are debt-free, hitting record revenue milestones, and sitting on the verge of massive institutional recognition.
Riskified (NYSE: RSKD): The “Fraud Brain” of Global Commerce
The Problem: The Rising Cost of Digital Trust
Global e-commerce is a miracle of modern logistics, but it is plagued by an invisible tax: fraud. Every year, retailers lose billions of dollars to stolen credit cards, account takeovers, and fraudulent chargebacks.
Historically, merchants managed this risk by implementing strict security filters. The problem? Overly strict filters decline legitimate customers. If a customer tries to buy a $1,000 laptop and their card is falsely declined for suspected fraud, the retailer loses the sale and permanently damages the customer relationship. It is a constant, anxiety-inducing balancing act between preventing theft and maximizing revenue.
The Solution: Shifting the Liability to AI
Riskified offers a profound operational shift for global enterprises. Rather than selling a software tool that flags suspicious activity and leaves the final decision up to the merchant, Riskified uses deep machine learning to make real-time approvals—and backs them with a 100% financial guarantee.
If Riskified’s AI approves a transaction that later turns out to be fraudulent, Riskified pays the cost of the chargeback, not the merchant. By shifting the liability from the retailer to the AI, they perfectly align their incentives with their clients. Riskified only makes money when merchants safely grow their gross merchandise volume (GMV).
This is not a theoretical concept; it is an active shield protecting the world’s largest retailers. Furthermore, they are expanding their ecosystem into “agentic commerce,” creating security protocols for native AI shopping assistants.
The Data: From Cash Burn to GAAP Profitability
The transition from a high-growth startup to a mature, profitable enterprise is the most critical phase in a tech company’s lifecycle. Riskified just crossed that threshold.
In their Q4 2025 earnings, Riskified reported record quarterly revenue of $99.3 million. More importantly, they achieved their first-ever quarter of GAAP profitability, posting a net profit of $5.8 million.
This profitability is driven by massive operating leverage. Because their AI models are becoming more efficient, their GAAP gross profit margins expanded to 57%. When you combine this operational discipline with a pristine balance sheet—holding nearly $300 million in cash and zero debt—you find a company with total control over its destiny. They are currently utilizing this cash surplus to fund a $75 million share repurchase program, signaling immense internal confidence.
🧠 Smart Money Talk takeaway: Growth without profitability is a ticking clock. When a technology company transitions from burning cash to generating actual GAAP profit while maintaining zero debt, the fundamental narrative changes. It ceases to be a speculative bet and becomes a mathematical compounding machine.
Alarum Technologies (NASDAQ: ALAR): The Data Pipeline for LLMs
The Problem: The Insatiable Hunger for Training Data
If you want to build a Large Language Model (LLM) capable of passing the bar exam, writing code, or analyzing financial markets, you need data. You need unfathomable oceans of human text, pricing information, and consumer behavior metrics.
AI models are incredibly hungry, and the companies building them are engaged in a fierce global race to acquire high-quality training data. But scraping the internet at an enterprise scale is complex. Websites block IP addresses, data gets bottlenecked, and privacy protocols create massive logistical hurdles. AI labs need a reliable, high-speed way to gather public web data anonymously and continuously.
The Solution: The Digital Toll Booth
Alarum Technologies, primarily through its subsidiary NetNut, provides the infrastructure to solve this exact problem. They operate a high-speed hybrid proxy network.
Think of Alarum not as an AI company, but as the digital toll booth that AI companies must drive through to get their raw materials. Enterprise clients and AI developers pay for access to this network to scrape massive datasets safely. Their revenue is based on data usage volume and subscription tiers.
As the race for “AI Sovereignty” accelerates globally, the demand for Alarum’s network becomes completely inelastic. Regardless of which major tech giant eventually builds the best AI model, they all need the foundational data that Alarum’s pipeline secures.
The Data: Explosive Top-Line Growth
Alarum is currently in an aggressive “land-grab” phase of its business cycle. They are prioritizing market share and infrastructure capacity over short-term margin maximization, a classic strategy for dominant infrastructure plays.
The numbers reflect this intense scaling. In Q3 2025, Alarum reported revenue of $13.0 million, representing a staggering 81% increase year-over-year. This growth is driven by a 26% increase in paying customers and a 17% rise in average revenue per customer. Existing clients are actively ramping up their data consumption.
Like Riskified, Alarum boasts a remarkably clean balance sheet for a small-cap tech stock. With over $24 million in cash and zero debt, they are funding their own explosive growth without diluting shareholders through toxic financing. Despite this fundamental strength, the stock trades at a significant disconnect from its estimated intrinsic value, making it a highly compelling target for institutional tech funds seeking hidden gems.
🧠 Smart Money Talk takeaway: In a gold rush, the most reliable wealth is generated behind the scenes. While the masses gamble on which consumer-facing AI application will win, the smart money quietly buys the plumbing, the picks, and the shovels that make the entire industry possible.
Navigating the Next Phase of AI Economy Growth
To build true financial independence, you have to separate the signal from the noise. The headlines will always focus on the consumer novelties—the newest text-to-video generator or the smartest virtual assistant. But stability on paper means little if you do not understand the mechanics of how these tools are actually built and secured.
When evaluating the best AI stocks 2026 has to offer, look for the unglamorous essentials.
Riskified represents the intelligence shield, proving that AI can turn a massive corporate cost center (fraud) into an engine for guaranteed revenue growth. Alarum Technologies represents the data engine, proving that the companies supplying the raw materials often hold the most pricing power.
You do not need to predict the future perfectly to profit from it. You simply need to position your capital in the inevitable pathways of progress. The AI revolution is no longer a concept waiting to happen. It is a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure build-out happening right now. Make sure you own a piece of the foundation.