Growth & Innovation 2026 Outlook  

The ATB Take: 2025 was a good, but weird year for growth investors. The April Tariff panic proved to be an “it was all a dream” correction, sharp, but brief. The April lows provided an outstanding base for a strong run, right as the HPC/AI theme produced a tremendous amount of positive news. A number of growth stocks levered to AI showed significant gains during the year. Notable bears echoed fears of an AI bubble, and the market has been debating ever since. The forward P/E for the market is above average but does not scream bubble, in our view. We think that the investments being made in AI can be justified by productivity gains. Real time evidence continues to point to strong returns for existing investments in AI compute, scaling laws remain intact and demand is intact. We believe AI remains the key theme across tech for another year and the backdrop for growth stocks in 2026 remains attractive. We believe the time is coming to deploy capital into SaaS names becoming value stocks, and we upgrade DCBO. Our top picks for 2026 are GLXY, BITF and DCBO.  

Key Themes: 

Year Three of Power Demand for AI Value Creation 
The AI theme has driven the market for several years, and access and time to power, while incredibly volatile, has rewarded investors in 2024 and 2025. In our view, the plethora of deals in 2025 validated the need for power to run AI/HPC and the miners’ utility to hyperscalers. We believe hyperscalers’ plans indicate a need to continue to invest in and secure data centre infrastructure and we expect BTC miners to contract power and develop additional power.

Key Controversies Addressed
We share an opinion on the potential for an AI Bubble, credit spreads for the AI universe, economics of GPUaaS, the useful life of a GPU, US power scarcity.

Has the Crypto Cycle Broken Down?
We do not think so; one reason is that we have not yet had a euphoric run-up yet during this cycle. Perhaps the cyclicality of BTC has changed because it has a ~$2tn market cap. If so, $80,000 might be a reasonable trough for a major correction? We expect more crypto IPOs, supportive US government action, innovation and adoption.  

We Do Not Want to Miss AI Shopping
We believe one of AI’s highest value applications will likely be as a force multiplier for e-commerce growth. Despite the ambitious announcements from OpenAI, Amazon, Perplexity and Gemini to date, very little true ecommerce is happening in chatbots. It is too early for AI shopping to impact SHOP’s Q4/25, but we believe AI will be net positive for SHOP, we look for signs on timing. 

Will SaaS Get the AI Monkey off its Back? 
We think that SaaS has an AI perception problem. Palantir (PLTR-O, NR) is worth $500bn, and trades at 70x NTM P/S, one thesis is that if that valuation is correct, then Kinaxis and a laundry list of other SaaS companies could also be at risk. We continue to believe SaaS companies like DCBO and KXS, will effectively incorporate AI into their solutions, and drive value from application layer AI investments. We do not expect a general renaissance for SaaS valuations in 2026, however, we upgrade DCBO, on valuation.    

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