Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) have been two of the best-performing stocks on the market this year, and artificial intelligence is the major reason. Nvidia needs little introduction at this point. The chip stock has come to dominate the market for data center GPUs (graphics processing units) in the AI boom, which has driven its stock price up roughly 10 times since the start of 2024.