Looking at where to put money in the market right now, there are some solid investment plays worth considering even with the S&P 500 near record levels. If you're thinking long-term and can hold for a few years, ignoring the short-term noise makes sense. I've been looking at two stocks that stand out: Broadcom and IBM.

Broadcom has been catching a lot of attention lately. The company makes wireless chips, networking gear, and here's the key part - custom AI accelerator chips that are becoming a huge business. They also picked up VMware a while back to strengthen their infrastructure software side. What's driving the growth? Their AI chips are selling like crazy. In fiscal 2025, AI chip sales jumped 65% to hit $20 billion, which represented 31% of total revenue. The whole company grew revenue 24% and EPS 40% that year. Looking ahead, analysts expect revenue and EPS to grow around 52% and 51% respectively in fiscal 2026. For a stock trading at 32 times forward earnings, those are pretty remarkable growth numbers.

Then there's IBM. This company had a rough decade of declining sales before Arvind Krishna became CEO in 2020. The turnaround strategy was smart - spin off the slow-moving infrastructure business as Kyndryl, then focus on hybrid cloud and AI. Instead of fighting Amazon and the big public cloud players head-on, IBM used Red Hat to build open-source solutions that let companies blend their private clouds with public platforms. That hybrid approach really resonated with enterprises not ready to go all-in on public cloud. Last year IBM posted 8% revenue growth and 12% EPS growth. Analysts are projecting another 5% revenue growth and 7% EPS growth for 2026. At 21 times forward earnings, it still looks reasonably priced.

Both companies represent the kind of great stocks to invest in when you want exposure to the AI trend without betting everything on a single narrative. Broadcom's growth is more explosive but comes with higher valuation, while IBM offers more stability with steady cloud and AI expansion. If you're looking at where to deploy $10,000 right now, these are the types of quality plays that could compound significantly over several years.