Artificial intelligence is still an abstract concept for many everyday consumers unsure about how it will change their lives. But there’s no question about whether businesses are finding value in it.

Some of the biggest winners in this year’s stock market rally that’s seen the Nasdaq jump 33% and other U.S. indexes notch double-digit gains have direct ties to the rapid advancements in AI. Chipmaker Nvidia is among them, but it’s not alone.

The other standout theme that’s driven this year’s outperformers is crypto. Starting with the launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January, cryptocurrencies had a big 2024, punctuated by Donald Trump’s election victory, which was funded heavily by the crypto industry. A number of stocks tied to crypto got a big boost.

With four trading days left in the year, here are the five best-performing U.S. tech stocks of 2024 among companies valued at $5 billion or more.

AppLovin entered the year with a market cap of about $13 billion and was best known for investing in a collection of mobile gaming studios that had produced titles like “Woody Block Puzzle,” “Clockmaker” and “Bingo Story.”

As it exits the year, AppLovin’s valuation has soared past $110 billion, making it worth more than Starbucks, Intel and Airbnb. At Tuesday’s close, AppLovin shares are up 758% this year, far surpassing all other tech companies.

While AppLovin went public in 2021, riding a Covid-era wave of excitement in online games, the business is now centered around online ads and booming profits from advancements in AI.

Last year, AppLovin released the updated 2.0 version of its ad search engine called AXON, which helps put more targeted ads on the gaming apps the company owns and is also used by studios that license the technology. Software platform revenue in the third quarter increased 66% to $835 million, outpacing total growth of 39%.

Net income in the quarter soared 300%, lifting the company’s profit margin to 36.3% from 12.6% in the course of a year.

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi, whose net worth has swelled past $10 billion, is even more excited about what’s coming. On the company’s earnings call in November, Foroughi raved about a test e-commerce project that allows businesses to offer targeted ads in games.

“In all my years, It’s the best product I’ve ever seen released by us, fastest growing, but it’s still in pilot,” he said.

After climbing 346% in 2023, it was hard to imagine MicroStrategy’s stock finding another gear. But it did.

The company’s share price has jumped 467% this year on the back of a bitcoin-buying strategy that’s made founder Michael Saylor a crypto cult hero.

In mid-2020, the company announced a plan to start buying bitcoin. Up to that point, MicroStrategy had been a middling business intelligence software vendor, but since then, its purchased over 444,000 bitcoins, using its ever-increasing share price as a way to sell stock, raise debt and buy more coin.

It’s now the world’s fourth-largest holder of bitcoin, behind only creator Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and crypto exchange Binance, with a stockpile valued at close to $44 billion. MicroStrategy’s market cap has swelled from about $1.1 billion when it was just a software company to $80 billion today.

While the rally was long underway prior to November, Trump’s election victory last month added fuel. The stock is up 57% since then while bitcoin has gained about 44%. Trump once called bitcoin a “scam,” but he was the industry’s preferred choice in this election and was backed heavily by some of the leading players, including Coinbase.

“With the red sweep, Bitcoin is surging up with tailwinds, and the rest of the digital assets will also begin to surge,” Saylor told CNBC soon after the election. He said bitcoin remains the “safe trade” in the crypto space, but as a “digital assets framework” is put into place for the broader crypto market, “there’ll be a surge in the entire digital assets industry.”

Palantir had a lot of big runs in 2024 on its way to a 380% gain in its stock price. One of its best stretches came last month, when the software company boosted its revenue outlook a day ahead of the presidential election.

The company, which sells data analytics tools to defense agencies, bumped up its target for 2024, with fourth-quarter guidance that blew away analysts’ estimates. Palantir also topped results for the third quarter, leading CEO Alex Karp to declare in the earnings release, “We absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won’t slow down.”

The stock jumped 23% on the earnings report and then another 8.6% the next day after Trump’s win. Palantir co-founder and board member Peter Thiel was a big Trump booster in the 2016 campaign and helped organize a meeting with tech execs at Trump Tower soon after that election. Karp was one of the attendees.

Karp, however, openly backed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the 2024 campaign. He told The New York Times in a story published in August that Thiel’s earlier support of Trump and the backlash that followed made it “actually harder to get things done.”

Still, Wall Street has rallied behind Palantir following the election on optimism that more military spending will flow to the company.

Karp’s comments in the earnings report ahead of the election suggest the company would be fine either way.

“The growth of our business is accelerating, and our financial performance is exceeding expectations as we meet an unwavering demand for the most advanced artificial intelligence technologies from our U.S. government and commercial customers,” Karp said in a letter to shareholders.

Analysts expect revenue growth in 2025 of about 24% to $3.5 billion, according to LSEG.

Robinhood shares more than tripled in value this year, despite a 17% drop on Oct. 31, following disappointing earnings.

Investors looked past those numbers a few days later, driving the stock up 20% after Trump’s election win, as all things tied to crypto rallied. One of Robinhood’s biggest growth engines is crypto, which retail investors can easily purchase on the app, alongside their stocks.

Revenue from crypto transactions jumped 165% in the third quarter from a year earlier to $61 million, accounting for 10% of total net revenue.

In addition to bitcoin, Robinhood users can easily buy about 20 other cryptocurrencies, ranging from popular digital assets like etherium to alt-coins such as dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Bonk. At the company’s investor day in November, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that crypto is more than just an investment but also a “disruptive technology that will change the underlying infrastructure beneath payments, loans and a wide variety of tradable assets.”

For the fourth quarter, analysts are expecting Robinhood to report revenue growth of over 70% to $805.7 million, according to LSEG, which would be the fastest rate of growth for any quarter since 2021, the year the company went public.

Robinhood’s rally this year has exceeded that of Coinbase, which has jumped 61%. But with a market cap of $70 billion, Coinbase is still twice as valuable.

Nvidia’s astounding run has continued.

Following last year’s 239% gain, powered by excitement around generative AI, Nvidia soared another 183% this year, adding a whopping $2.2 trillion in market cap.

Twice this year Nvidia grabbed the title of world’s most valuable publicly traded company. Apple has jumped back ahead and is approaching $4 trillion, with Nvidia at $3.4 trillion and Microsoft at $3.3 trillion.

Nvidia remains the biggest beneficiary of the AI boom, as the largest cloud vendors and internet companies snap up all the graphics processing units they can find. Annual revenue has increased by at least 94% in each of the past six quarters, with growth exceeding 200% three times in that stretch.

CEO Jensen Huang said in the company’s latest earnings report that the next-generation AI chip called Blackwell is in “full production.” Finance chief Colette Kress said the company is on track for “several billion dollars” of Blackwell revenue in its fourth quarter.

“Every customer is racing to be the first to market,” Kress said. “Blackwell is now in the hands of all of our major partners, and they are working to bring up their data centers.”

While growth is expected to remain robust for a company of Nvidia’s size, the inevitable slowdown is coming. Analysts are projecting year-over-year deceleration over the next several quarters with growth dipping into the mid-40s by the second half of next year.

Nvidia counts on an outsized amount of revenue from a handful of tech giants, so any economic swings present significant risk to investors.

That helps explain why Nvidia likes to tell Wall Street about the extensive roster of companies that are building new AI services and “are racing to accelerate development of these applications with the potential for billions of agents to be deployed in the coming years,” Kress said on the earnings call.

WATCH: Next year is a ‘stock-picker’s market’

If the Covid era marked a boom time for digital health companies, 2024 was the reckoning.

In a year that saw the Nasdaq jump 32%, surpassing 20,000 for the first time this month, health tech providers largely suffered. Of 39 public digital health companies analyzed by CNBC, roughly two-thirds are down for the year. Others are now out of business.

There were some breakout stars, like Hims & Hers Health, which was buoyed by the success of its popular new weight loss offering and its position in the GLP-1 craze. But that was an exception.

While there were some company-specific challenges in the industry, overall it was a “year of inflection,” according to Scott Schoenhaus, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets covering health-care IT companies. Business models that appeared poised to break out during the pandemic haven’t all worked as planned, and companies have had to refocus on profitability and a more muted growth environment.

“The pandemic was a huge pull forward in demand, and we’re facing those tough, challenging comps,” Schoenhaus told CNBC in an interview. “Growth clearly slowed for most of my names, and I think employers, payers, providers and even pharma are more selective and more discerning on digital health companies that they partnered with.” 

In 2021, digital health startups raised $29.1 billion, blowing past all previous funding records, according to a report from Rock Health. Almost two dozen digital health companies went public through an initial public offering or special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that year, up from the previous record of eight in 2020. Money was pouring into themes that played into remote work and remote health as investors looked for growth with interest rates stuck near zero.

But as the worst waves of the pandemic subsided, so did the insatiable demand for new digital health tools. It’s been a rude awakening for the sector.  

“What we’re still going through is an understanding of the best ways to address digital health needs and capabilities, and the push and pull of the current business models and how successful they may be,” Michael Cherny, an analyst at Leerink Partners, told CNBC. “We’re in a settling out period post Covid.”

Progyny, which offers benefits solutions for fertility and family planning, is down more than 60% year to date. Teladoc Health, which once dominated the virtual-care space, has dropped 58% and is 96% off its 2021 high.

When Teladoc acquired Livongo in 2020, the companies had a combined enterprise value of $37 billion. Teladoc’s market cap now sits at under $1.6 billion.

GoodRx, which offers price transparency tools for medications, is down 33% year to date. 

Schoenhaus says many companies’ estimates were too high this year.

Progyny cut its full-year revenue guidance in every earnings report in 2024. In February, Progyny was predicting $1.29 billion to $1.32 billion in annual revenue. By November, the range was down to $1.14 billion to $1.15 billion.

GoodRx also repeatedly slashed its full-year guidance for 2024. What was $800 million to $810 million in May shrank to $794 million by the November.

In Teladoc’s first-quarter report, the company said it expected full-year revenue of $2.64 billion to $2.74 billion. The company withdrew its outlook in its second quarter, and reported consecutive year-over year declines.

“This has been a year of coming to terms with the growth outlook for many of my companies, and so I think we can finally look at 2025 as maybe a better year in terms of the setups,” Schoenhaus said.  

While overzealous forecasting tells part of the digital health story this year, there were some notable stumbles at particular companies. 

Dexcom, which makes devices for diabetes and glucose management, is down more than 35% year to date. The stock tumbled more than 40% in July – its steepest decline ever – after the company reported disappointing second-quarter results and issued weak full-year guidance. 

CEO Kevin Sayer attributed the challenges to a restructuring of the sales team, fewer new customers than expected and lower revenue per user. Following the report, JPMorgan Chase analysts marveled at “the magnitude of the downside” and the fact that it “appears to mostly be self-inflicted.” 

Genetic testing company 23andMe had a particularly rough year. The company went public via a SPAC in 2021, valuing the business at $3.5 billion, after its at-home DNA testing kits skyrocketed in popularity. The company is now worth less than $100 million and CEO Anne Wojcicki is trying to keep it afloat.

In September, all seven independent directors resigned from 23andMe’s board, citing disagreements with Wojcicki about the “strategic direction for the company.” Two months later, 23andMe said it planned to cut 40% of its workforce and shutter its therapeutics business as part of a restructuring plan. 

Wojcicki has repeatedly said she intends to take 23andMe private. The stock is down more than 80% year to date. 

Digital health’s bright spots

Investors in Hims & Hers had a much better year.

Shares of the direct-to-consumer marketplace are up more than 200% year to date, pushing the company’s market cap to $6 billion, thanks to soaring demand for GLP-1s. 

Hims & Hers began prescribing compounded semaglutide through its platform in May after launching a new weight loss program late last year. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster medications Ozempic and Wegovy, which can cost around $1,000 a month without insurance. Compounded semaglutide is a cheaper, custom-made alternative to the brand drugs and can be produced when the brand-name treatments are in shortage.

Hims & Hers will likely have to contend with dynamic supply and regulatory environments next year, but even before adding compounded GLP-1s to its portfolio, the company said in its February earnings call that it expects its weight loss program to bring in more than $100 million in revenue by the end of 2025. 

Doximity, a digital platform for medical professionals, also had a strong 2024, with its stock price more than doubling. The company’s platform, which for years has been likened to a LinkedIn for doctors, allows clinicians to stay current on medical news, manage paperwork, find referrals and carry out telehealth appointments with patients. 

Doximity primarily generates revenue through its hiring solutions, telehealth tools and marketing offerings for clients like pharmaceutical companies.

Leerink’s Cherny said Doximity’s success can be attributed to its lean operating model, as well as the “differentiated mousetrap” it’s created because of its reach into the physician network. 

“DOCS is a rare company in healthcare IT as it is already profitable, generates strong incremental margins, and is a steady grower,” Leerink analysts, including Cherny, wrote in a November note. The firm raised its price target on the stock to $60 from $35. 

Another standout this year was Oscar Health, the tech-enabled insurance company co-founded by Thrive Capital Management’s Joshua Kushner. Its shares are up nearly 50% year to date. The company supports roughly 1.65 million members and plans to expand to around 4 million by 2027. 

Oscar showed strong revenue growth in its third-quarter report in November. Sales climbed 68% from a year earlier to $2.4 billion.

Additionally, two digital health companies, Waystar and Tempus AI, took the leap and went public in 2024. 

The IPO market has been largely dormant since late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risk. Few technology companies have gone public since then, and no digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health. 

Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, has seen its stock jump to $36.93 from its IPO price of $21.50 in June. Tempus, a precision medicine company, hasn’t fared as well. It’s stock has slipped to $34.91 from its IPO price of $37, also in June.

“Hopefully, the valuations are more supportive of opportunities for other companies that have been lingering in the background as private companies for the last several years.” Schoenhaus said. 

Out with the old

Several digital health companies exited the public markets entirely this year. 

Cue Health, which made Covid tests and counted Google as an early customer, and Better Therapeutics, which used digital therapeutics to treat cardiometabolic conditions, both shuttered operations and delisted from the Nasdaq. 

Revenue cycle management company R1 RCM was acquired by TowerBrook Capital Partners and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in an $8.9 billion deal. Similarly, Altaris bought Sharecare, which runs a virtual health platform, for roughly $540 million.

Commure, a private company that offers tools for simplifying clinicians’ workflows, acquired medical AI scribing company Augmedix for about $139 million.

“There was a lot of competition that entered the marketplace during the pandemic years, and we’ve seen some of that being flushed out of the markets, which is a good thing,” Schoenhaus said.

Cherny said the sector is adjusting to a post-pandemic period, and digital health companies are figuring out their role.

“We’re still cycling through what could be almost termed digital health 1.1 business models,” he said. “It’s great to say we do things digitally, but it only matters if it has some approach toward impacting the ‘triple aim’ of health care: better care, more convenient, lower cost.”

President-elect Donald Trump is tapping tech heavyweights to join his new administration, continuing a trend of Silicon Valley’s growing influence in a second Trump White House.

Trump said Sunday he would nominate Scott Kupor, a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to be director of the Office of Personnel Management, which coordinates recruitment and provides resources for government employees.

Kupor thanked Trump in a post on X and said the opportunity would allow him to work with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in their leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a nascent commission aimed at cutting government spending and regulation.

Trump also picked Sriram Krishnan as senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Krishnan, who most recently served as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has had a long career in tech, with roles at Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Snap and Yahoo. He has previous ties to Musk, helping him “temporarily” run the social media service X after Musk acquired the platform, formerly known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk, a tech billionaire who was one of Trump’s top donors and most vocal supporters during his campaign, has emerged as one of the president-elect’s closest advisors. His outsized influence over Trump has led to growing consternation among Democrats, foreign leaders and business executives, some of whom compete with Musk’s companies. Along with X, Musk runs vehicle maker Tesla, defense contractor SpaceX and brain tech startup Neuralink.

Krishnan will likely work closely with David Sacks, another tech executive who has a long history with Musk. Trump earlier this month named Sacks — a venture capitalist, former PayPal COO and popular podcaster — as “czar” of crypto and AI.

Trump on Sunday also tapped Ken Howery, a co-founder of PayPal and Founders Fund, as his pick for U.S. ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark. And he appointed Michael Kratsios, who was most recently a managing director at tech startup Scale AI, as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios served as chief technology officer during Trump’s first administration.

In addition, Trump named former Uber executive Emil Michael as undersecretary for research and engineering.

Tech business leaders cheered the choices in social media posts. Former Meta executive David Marcus called Trump’s selections “remarkable picks,” while Box CEO Aaron Levie said the choices were “very strong.”

Since Trump’s election victory, a slew of tech companies have thrown their support behind the president-elect — a significant departure from his first term, when the industry at large maintained a tense relationship with Trump.

Amazon, Meta and OpenAI Sam Altman have announced donations of $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural committee. And in recent weeks, Silicon Valley executives have made pilgrimages to Trump’s residence Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.