Is Upstart Holdings, Inc. (UPST) the Best Mid Cap AI Stock to Buy Now?

Bob Karr

Sat, Mar 29, 2025, 3:58 PM 6 min read

We recently published a list of 10 Best Mid Cap AI Stocks to Buy Now. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Upstart Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:UPST) stands against other best mid cap AI stocks to buy now.

In 2025, the technology companies continue to focus on developing AI platforms that meet their enterprise customers’ needs for optimized performance, profitability and security, says Morgan Stanley. In doing so, they have been partnering throughout the AI ecosystem of chips companies, hyperscalers, large language models, and data and software companies while grappling with the US trade policy unknowns and resource constraints. The firm believes that the top trends in new AI frontiers and the emphasis on enterprises consist of AI reasoning, cloud migrations, custom silicon, systems to measure AI efficacy, and developing an agentic AI future.

Morgan Stanley, while quoting executives from companies designing and making chips, stated that AI reasoning happens to be one of the biggest drivers of higher compute demand, and thus, semiconductors. Notably, AI reasoning goes over and above the basic understanding and into advanced learning and decision-making, which needs additional compute for pre-training, post-training, and inference. As per Marco Lagos Morales (Head of U.S. Semiconductor Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley), for chip companies, customer demand remains in the breadth of AI workloads for programmable infrastructure.

The next theme revolves around LLMs seeing potential in AI reasoning for enterprises. Morgan Stanley highlighted that companies that have developed the world’s biggest LLMs focus on using the most effective chips and building the best software to provide AI services that become critical for companies and consumers. As per LLM executives, while the early use cases for LLMs revolved around content generation, summarization, and classification, the biggest untapped potential is in AI reasoning for the enterprise data.

READ ALSO: 7 Best Stocks to Buy For Long-Term and 8 Cheap Jim Cramer Stocks to Invest In.

The software executives mentioned regarding their current use of AI for the purposes of productivity gains in marketing and engineering and their longer-term prospects in a bid to gain market share in an agentic computing future. Morgan Stanley further highlighted that such companies continue to aim to create large systems deploying AI agents to make decisions, take autonomous actions, and adapt to dynamic environments for real-world applications throughout various industries. According to Brittany Skoda, Global Head of Software Banking, software companies continue to compete to create larger operating systems that harness machine learning, natural language processing, LLMs, GenAI, and decision-making algorithms to move towards an agentic future.