Through the first six months of the year, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes each gained roughly 5%. Similar to last year, some of the biggest gainers in the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape so far include Palantir Technologies, Constellation Energy, and Oracle.

By contrast, several members of the megacap collective known as the "Magnificent Seven" have witnessed sell-offs throughout 2025. One member sticks out among the pack, though.

As of closing bell on July 1, shares of Meta Platforms (META 0.73%) have gained 23% on the year -- quietly outperforming all of its peers. If Meta has gone overlooked in your search for the next big AI opportunity, I wouldn't be surprised. Yet savvy investors seem to understand how AI has the potential to completely transform Meta from a social media and gaming empire into something far more sophisticated.

Let's explore some of the moves Meta has made this year that you may have missed. While Nvidia and Microsoft remain solid picks, Meta could be the surprise winner among megacap AI stocks this year.

Meta has a history of identifying hot trends and talent

Meta Platforms was originally called Facebook and only rebranded to its new name a few years ago. Facebook was an early pioneer in social media -- bringing a new dimension to how people communicated and connected.

Fairly early on in Facebook's history, the company made two surprising multibillion-dollar acquisitions -- Instagram and WhatsApp. At the time, both of these deals looked like head-scratchers.

Instagram was a pre-revenue start-up whose main product was a photo application that allowed users to apply cool filters to their pictures. WhatsApp was a text messaging tool with little presence in the U.S. (one of Facebook's core markets).

As investors know today, Instagram and WhatsApp have completely revolutionized Meta's business. By augmenting the Facebook platform with other applications, Meta essentially built an ecosystem of apps that can be used by both people and businesses alike -- helping them with everything from social connection to e-commerce, marketing, advertising, and more.

While these moves strategically positioned Meta during the early phases of desktop and mobile internet, the company now needs to prove it can adjust to the technology world's newest megatrend: AI. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta is using its old playbook of acquisitions and strategic capital allocation to build its AI operation.

Image source: Getty Images.

Meta just went on another shopping spree

Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently unveiled his new vision for the company, called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). As part of MSL's creation, Meta has already spent billions across strategic investments and acquiring top talent away from competitors.

For example, last month Meta announced it is investing $14.3 billion into Scale AI. The company has also been aggressively hiring researchers from ChatGPT developer OpenAI. Multiple media outlets have reported that Meta is offering these OpenAI employees signing bonuses of up to $100 million to sweeten the package. It's unclear how accurate these reports are, or how many OpenAI workers might have accepted the proposed deal, but it's inspiring stuff anyhow.

Scale AI specializes in annotating large datasets accurately and efficiently. This is important criteria for training and scaling AI models. As such, accessing Scale AI's processes will likely help Meta improve its own algorithms as it relates to personalized recommendation feeds across its various social platforms and the billions of people who use them.

Is Meta stock a buy right now?

When Meta acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, the underlying thesis wasn't simply for the company to add more users. Rather, the idea was to complement Facebook with other properties, and over time, evolve those platforms to help build long-term value for both individual users and businesses alike.

Similarly, by investing heavily into AI infrastructure, Meta is now positioning itself to bring its social, gaming, commerce, and advertising businesses to an unparalleled level. AI will help Meta monetize its vast and growing user data in new ways, ushering in new waves of revenue and profitability.

META PE Ratio data by YCharts

Yet even with such robust growth prospects, Meta still trades at price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 28 -- a steep discount to some of the more mainstream AI opportunities among big tech.

To me, Meta's long-term potential in the AI realm is being overlooked. Moreover, now with a bevy of new talent running MSL, I'm optimistic some big and positive changes are in store. With that in mind, the second half of 2025 could bring some interesting surprises to Meta.

I think the stock is a no-brainer for investors with a long-term time horizon, and I see the price action above as a reasonable entry point into the stock.