AI, tech, gold, and some surprises

There’s no question that this year was a banger for U.S. stocks. Many of the biggest winners won’t surprise even casual market observers, much less anyone who can name the mega-cap tech giants from memory. And yet, a few unexpected names still managed to muscle their way into the top ranks.

In previous decades, 100%-plus gains were typically the stuff of small caps and penny stocks. But the 2020s have flipped that script, and 2025 kept the trend going, with a familiar mix of Magnificent Seven names and their nearest peers dominating price charts and posting returns more often associated with speculative frenzies than established giants.

Breaking it down by category makes the broad trend ultra-clear.

Western Digital, a major maker of high-capacity hard drives, gained an eye-watering 275% through late December. Seagate Technology, another data-storage play, posted 226% returns as investors bet on AI-infrastructure demand.

Micron Technology’s 210% surge similarly speaks to the “hard” side of the AI trade that defined the year. In 2025, the company rode historic demand to record revenue, margins, and cash flow, with high-bandwidth memory emerging as a core growth engine. Investors responded by sending the stock — over and over, throughout the year — to new all-time highs. The 12-month price chart looks less like a hockey stick and more like a rocket launch.

That same pattern was seen across semiconductor-equipment plays as investors looked beyond GPUs to the entire manufacturing stack. Lam Research began the year trading around the $70 mark, and will close it trading around the $170 mark, with the stock up nearly 150%.

As AI-related hardware rallied, so did software and platform companies with clear AI hooks. Palantir Technologies was among the year’s biggest gainers, rising 157% through late December, buoyed by growing government and enterprise contracts and a story that framed its software as key to AI-driven decision-making.

The AI stock boom didn’t happen in a vacuum. Retail investors helped power the trend. So no wonder some retail trading platforms also had a banner year. Robinhood Markets surged as stock market enthusiasm and crypto trading translated into revenue momentum, with the stock packing on a total of 209% through late December.

Among the most interesting market trends of 2025? The surge of precious metals — traditional safe-haven plays — right alongside tech and growth. It’s an unusual pattern that harkens back to the market’s post-pandemic moves. In any case, gold had a historic run, with prices surging 70% year to date through late December.

Unsurprisingly, with gold prices pushing to fresh highs, miners like Newmont also rank among 2025’s top performers. The logic here is straightforward. Higher bullion prices, steady production, and improved balance sheets make miners a leveraged way to take advantage of the broader precious-metals trade. So investors pile into bellwethers like Newmont, up over 180%; Barrick Gold, up 200%; and Agnico Eagle Mines, up 130%.

Some of the year’s biggest percentage gains came from companies clawing back just a bit of their glory-days glow. Intel, long written off as an also-ran, posted 80% gains through late December as investors warmed to its fund-raising ambitions and a government-backed manufacturing push. Takeover interest — to mean something more like a high-stakes takeover battle— saw Warner Bros Discovery top 180% returns after years of underperformance.

Market watchers won’t be shocked to learn that the Magnificent Seven broadly delivered around 20% returns on average in 2025, roughly in line with the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s strong year. What may surprise, though, is the clear standout within that group. Alphabet surged roughly 60% in 2025 alone, pulling decisively ahead of its mega-cap peers.

The Google parent’s rally gathered steam as it emerged as a favored holding of Berkshire Hathaway, and as its latest Gemini AI chatbot drew attention for closing the gap with ChatGPT. At the same time, buzz around a potential strategic deal involving Meta Platforms added an extra layer of intrigue, helping turn Alphabet from a steady compounder into a headline grabber.

Strip away the labels, and 2025’s best-performing stocks share a few traits. Most had market caps within the mid-cap range, if not large-cap. Most offered access to major market themes — AI infrastructure and AI enterprise spending, or the “debasement trade.” Meanwhile, alongside these themes, a great wash of capital surged into the market.

That last point matters. In a tighter market, capital is rationed. In 2025, it wasn’t. Investors chased AI upside even as they dug for literal gold — perhaps making for a strange banner year, but a banner year nonetheless.