In short, while Microsoft and Nvidia are close contenders, Amazon is the best artificial intelligence (AI) stock in the S&P 500 to buy now, if "best" is defined as the stock with the highest net percentage of buy ratings. Here's what investors should know.

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) lit a blazing fire under many tech stocks. The biggest winners so far are foundational companies like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Microsoft. Nvidia supplies the high-end data center GPUs for processing complex AI tasks,

In the AI server space, Dell Technologies and Super Micro have also benefited from the data center boom, up 71% and 82%, respectively, in the past 12 months. Bitcoin miners are increasingly pivoting to artificial intelligence data center operations,

Microsoft and Oracle are top cloud computing stocks that benefit from the proliferation of AI services in the cloud. Microsoft is growing faster than Oracle right now. At the same time, Oracle's solid revenue pipeline is why its pace of growth is expected to top Microsoft's in the future.