13 Best Big Data Stocks To Buy Now

Published September 28, 2023 at 11:01 am EDT Updated August 31, 2026 at 12:01 pm EDT

In this article, we discuss the 13 best big data stocks to buy now.

Big Data analytics refers to the specialized techniques and technologies used to extract insights and information from large, diverse data sets. According to Fortune Business Insights, the size of the global Big Data analytics industry is set to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5% from 2022 to reach a size of $745.15 billion by the end of this decade. The size of the industry stood at $271.83 billion in 2022. The healthy growth rate reflects the untapped market potential of the Big Data analytics industry. Meanwhile, according to a study conducted by McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data has the potential to contribute an additional $3 trillion in value annually to the global economy due to its application in seven industries. Such significant numbers establish the importance of the industry and the players operating in it, such as Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), and NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA). In addition to the best big data stocks for the long term, investors looking to gain exposure to the Big Data theme can also choose to invest in a Big Data ETF like the Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF and ProShares Big Data Refiners ETF (NYSEARCA:DAT).

Big Data has made tremendous progress in the fields of cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. Research conducted at MIT has concluded that organizations adopting a data-driven decision-making model are expected to experience a 5% to 6% improvement in productivity and output compared to their competitors. Consequently, 92.2% of companies are increasing their investments in the field of Big Data. Key benefits of Big Data analytics include identifying business trends, determining root causes of problems, optimizing marketing campaigns, real-time fraud detection, and offering personalized recommendations. Experts believe that there will be an increasing demand for data analysts, scientists, and other related professionals as the world is witnessing an ever-increasing influx of data with every passing day. By 2025, the world is expected to have 150 billion gigabytes available for exploration and understanding. This figure reflects a 33 times increase in the volume of data and information available for analysis since 2013 when it stood at 4.4 billion gigabytes. According to Armonk, New York-based technology giant International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM), the US economy suffers an annual loss of $3.1 trillion due to poor data quality.

Currently, some of the primary sources of Big Data include social media posts, digital transactions, sensor data, weblogs, internet searches, and mobile applications. The global proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is anticipated to have a significant impact in the field of Big Data as well. Experts predict that there will be 20 billion IoT devices by the end of this decade that will generate and collect massive amounts of data in various forms like telemetry data, audio, video, and more. Big Data is considered the fuel that powers artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications. AI techniques leverage large datasets to “train” algorithms and models to perform tasks like image recognition, natural language processing, and prediction. Additionally, common machine learning methods like deep learning neural networks require substantial volumes of training data to identify meaningful patterns and relationships. As organizations and researchers accumulate larger datasets, the performance of AI systems improves. This reflects the idea that the growth in Big Data analytics will provide impetus to artificial intelligence and machine learning applications as well. A report issued by Fortune Business Insights on the prospects of the AI industry revealed that the industry is set to expand at a CAGR of 21.6% to reach a size of $2.03 trillion by 2030 as opposed to $428 billion in 2022. You can also check out the 20 Best-Funded AI Startups in 2023 here.

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Our Methodology

We have shortlisted the 13 best Big Data stocks using Insider Monkey’s database of 910 hedge funds. The companies selected have substantial exposure to the Big Data industry through various business operations. The Big Data analytics stocks have been listed in ascending order of the number of hedge funds holding a stake in them as of Q2 2023.

Best Big Data Stocks To Buy Now

13. Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ:SPLK)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 50

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $1,507,300,100

Market Capitalization: $24.40 billion

Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ:SPLK) is a San Francisco, California-based software company. The company is a provider of Big Data analytics platform used by organizations to collect, index, store, and analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real-time. Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) announced on September 21 that it intends to acquire Splunk Inc. for $28 billion to increase the company’s adoption of AI. The deal is expected to be closed by the end of Q3 2024.

12. International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 51

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $813,934,580

Market Capitalization: $133.44 billion

International Business Machines Corporation provides a mature integrated environment to store, process, analyze, and apply AI or machine learning on Big Data across hybrid cloud environments. On September 20, Matthew Swanson at RBC Capital initiated coverage on International Business Machines Corporation stock with an Outperform rating and a target price of $188. The analyst was impressed with the depth of the software platform offered by International Business Machines Corporation.

Here’s what Diamond Hill Capital said about International Business Machines Corporation in its Q4 2022 investor letter:

“New positions initiated in Q4 included shorts International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM), Acushnet Holdings (GOLF) and elf Beauty (ELF). Since diversified information technology company IBM’s 2019 acquisition of Red Hat, the company has aggressively pursued a hybrid cloud strategy. Though IBM and its new management team have made solid progress on this pivot, we believe the company still meaningfully lags the cloud hyperscalers and other cloud-native companies. Management has also laid out aggressive long-term targets for revenue growth and free cash flow, both of which we believe the company will struggle to achieve as it faces intense competition in its hybrid cloud business and structural headwinds in the company’s legacy businesses.”

11. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 56

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $2,124,533,700

Market Capitalization: $200.12 billion

Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) offers a range of consulting and technology services for Big Data strategy, implementation, and analytics. This includes advising clients on Big Data strategy, architecture, data governance, and program management. Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) claims that 92% of Big Data users are satisfied with the business outcomes of their initiatives, and 94% of the users believe that the implementation of Big Data initiatives fulfills their requirements.

Here’s what ClearBridge Investments said about Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“While the ClearBridge Multi Cap Growth Strategy has limited mega cap exposure, which has been a recent headwind to relative performance, we own several companies that stand to benefit from the explosive growth in generative AI. These holdings play key roles in building out the necessary infrastructure and helping customers leverage capabilities enabled by this emerging technology

Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN), a business and IT services consultant, will be instrumental in helping enterprises reinvent and modernize their IT architecture for AI. The company recently announced a $3 billion investment, which includes doubling their data and AI workforce to 80,000 to address this growing opportunity.”

10. MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDB)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 62

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $1,677,475,400

Market Capitalization as of September 25, 2023: $23.78 billion

MongoDB, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDB) is a New York-based company that offers a popular document-oriented NoSQL database that can handle large volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data. It uses a flexible JSON-like document model to store data, making it a good fit for Big Data from diverse sources. MongoDB, Inc. is one of the 20 stocks that the Citi Research team has recommended buying on the pullback with a long-term investment view.

9. Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 65

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $5,390,003,700

Market Capitalization: $49.37 billion

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is a Bozeman, Montana-based company that provides a fast, flexible cloud data platform known as the Snowflake Data Cloud to power modern Big Data warehousing and analytics initiatives. The company employs a unique architecture optimized for the cloud that separates storage, computing, and query processing for scalability and performance. According to the Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, customers using Snowflake’s Data Cloud have experienced an impressive return on investment (ROI) of 616% over three years.

Here’s what ClearBridge Investments said about Snowflake Inc. in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“While the ClearBridge Multi Cap Growth Strategy has limited mega cap exposure, which has been a recent headwind to relative performance, we own several companies that stand to benefit from the explosive growth in generative AI. These holdings play key roles in building out the necessary infrastructure and helping customers leverage capabilities enabled by this emerging technology.

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW), a cloud-based data platform company, is positioned well to help enterprises better leverage their own data to get the most out of AI models. Though it is still early days in terms of adoption, Snowflake saw workloads for data science, machine learning, and AI use cases grow more than 90% year-over-year in its most recent quarter.”

8. VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 70

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $9,018,082,300

Market Capitalization: $72 billion

VMware, Inc. (NYSE:VMW) has developed the VMware Big Data Extensions (BDE), which adds enterprise-grade features to open-source Big Data platforms. The company also provides Virtualized Big Data Management through its virtualization platform vSphere. VMware, Inc. is expected to be taken over by Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) for $69 billion by October 30, 2023. Presently, the deal is under review by Chinese regulatory authorities.

7. Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDOG)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 78

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $2,421,193,800

Market Capitalization: $28.87 billion

Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDOG) is a New York-based monitoring and analytics platform for cloud applications that can analyze large volumes of monitoring data from various sources.

On August 18, Andrew Sherman at TD Cowen initiated coverage on Datadog, Inc. with an Outperform rating and a target price of $120. The analyst highlighted that the entity has “very strong” net new customer additions and adoption of new offerings as well by existing customers.

Here’s what RiverPark Advisors said about Datadog, Inc. in its Q1 2023 investor letter:

“Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ:DDOG): DDOG was a top detractor in the quarter. The company reported strong 4Q results including 44% revenue growth and 30% earnings growth but gave cautious revenue guidance for 2023. Macroeconomic headwinds have caused clients to slow the transition of workloads to the cloud and instead to optimize current capacity. Despite this temporary slowdown, DDOG still expects revenue to grow nearly 25% in 2023.

As businesses have transitioned to cloud software infrastructure, much of which is in isolated data silos, it has become increasingly difficult for data engineers to monitor and analyze system performance. Datadog provides a SaaS software platform to monitor and analyze the system performance of software applications and IT infrastructure by giving users a single page view to observe their company’s technology stack. The company has quickly grown its revenue from $100 million in 2017 to $1.7 billion in 2022 and, we believe, should continue to grow revenue at more than 20% annually as it penetrates its $40 billion and fast-growing market. Less than 10% of software applications are currently monitored. The company’s dollar-based net retention rate has been 130%+ as existing customers continue to use an increasing number of products and the company continues to add new features. As of 4Q22, 81% of customers used 2+ products, while only 18% of customers used 6+ products (up from less than 1% two years ago). As an extremely capex light software business, DDOG already has significant free-cash-flow ($350m in 2022) and free-cash-flow margins (21% in 2022).”

6. Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 84

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $3,402,004,900

Market Capitalization: $296.72 billion

Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) has a comprehensive portfolio of products and cloud services for Big Data and analytics. This includes Oracle Big Data Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud, and Oracle Exadata Cloud. For data ingestion and processing, Oracle Corporation offers support for Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, NoSQL databases, and other Big Data technologies. The company highlights successful collaborations with corporations like Deloitte and Exelon, showing how its Big Data platform assists analytics teams in analyzing data to derive valuable insights.

Here’s what Madison Investments said about Oracle Corporation in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) reported a solid fiscal fourth quarter and provided guidance for the first quarter that continued to support solid growth for the company. Revenues grew 17% and were primarily driven by Cloud Services (up 29%) with Oracle’s cloud infrastructure (OCI) business growing 89% in the quarter. Oracle has messaged that this business has price-performance advantages as compared to the other infrastructure companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) and appears to be winning business as a result. On the earnings call, management made the case that OCI will play a significant role in the Generative AI workloads which bodes well for continued growth.”

In addition to Oracle Corporation, Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and NVIDIA Corporation are also some of the best big data stocks to buy now.

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5. Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 122

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $7,185,739,500

Market Capitalization: $200.77 billion

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) generates large volumes of customer data across sales, marketing, service, commerce, and other workloads that can be leveraged for Big Data analytics. Salesforce Einstein Analytics provides data visualization capabilities to analyze a billion rows of data interactively. Furthermore, Customer 360 Audiences enables the creation of unified customer profiles from data across Salesforce apps. Salesforce, Inc. has also announced plans to hire 3,300 employees across different departments, anticipating a new wave of technology investment.

Here’s what Harding Loevner said about Salesforce, Inc. in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM), a company we’ve owned since 2019, recently added ChatGPT-like capabilities onto its existing Al module, Einstein, to support its internal sales efforts and customer-facing software. For example, Einstein GPT can help generate marketing emails tailored to specific clients by using Salesforce’s customer database and past email correspondence to learn the most effective approach for each client. Einstein GPT is also different from off-the-shelf LLMS in three important ways: It keeps personal identifiable information private and secure, compared with external tools that retain anything a user enters. It employs the latest data in Salesforce’s system, as opposed to the sometimes-stale public data that train generic models. And generative Al capabilities can be integrated with other Salesforce offerings; the company has already introduced Slack GPT and Tableau GPT, Al-equipped versions of its workplace collaboration and analytics tools.”

4. NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 175

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $25,965,720,000

Market Capitalization: $1.04 trillion

NVIDIA Corporation offers graphic processing units (GPUs) that provide massive processing power, which is beneficial for running Big Data workloads that are parallelizable, like machine learning, deep learning, and analytics. The Santa Clara, California-based company saw its market capitalization surpass the $1 trillion level after the company recorded strong Q2 2023 results on the back of the AI boom. Following the results, NVIDIA Corporation announced a $25 billion share buyback plan, which has the distinction of being the fifth largest share buyback plan announcement by a US company.

Harding Loevner shared its stance on NVIDIA Corporation in its Q2 2023 investor. Here’s what the firm said:

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) has been the biggest beneficiary this year in terms of its stock run and projected revenue gains. More companies- including, perhaps, some not yet in existence-will certainly join the ranks over time.

In the meantime, NVIDIA has emerged as the unrivaled global leader in providing the technologies at the center of the Al arms race. NVIDIA’s competitive advantage is the result of investments that began two decades ago, when it recognized an early opportunity to repurpose its video-game graphics chips for the heavy-load computing done in scientific research. This led management to expand the GPU business. It also spent years and significant resources developing a free software platform that’s exclusive to its chips called CUDA that allows developers to easily program its GPUs for a variety of computationally intensive applications. Researchers then began using both NVIDIA’s chips and CUDA to train the human-brain-inspired neural networks that power Al models.

Now, due to an explosion of demand related to generative Al and LLMs from across its customer base, NVIDIA projects that data-center revenue for its fiscal second quarter ending in July will surge to US$11 billion. Not only is that more than double last quarter’s total, but the forecast also shattered the average analyst estimate that called for about US$7 billion. Taking advantage of the stock’s meteoric rise, we reduced our holding (it has risen tenfold since we first purchased in 2018)…” (Click here to read the full text)

3. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 204

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $17,286,889,000

Market Capitalization: $1.66 trillion

Alphabet Inc. utilizes Big Data analytics internally to analyze petabytes of data generated from its various services like Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, and Cloud. The company has extensive expertise and technologies focused on storage, processing, analytics, and machine learning. Furthermore, Google’s parent company is leveraging the power of Big Data and robotics to combat food shortages globally, as the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050.

Here’s what Artisan Partners said about Alphabet Inc. in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“Our best performing stocks this quarter were Meta, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Heidelberg Materials. The rise in Alphabet’s share performance was primarily driven by the AI frenzy. Earlier this year, there were some doubts about Alphabet’s ability to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT product. This was a bit ironic since Alphabet has been using AI technology to improve its Google search results and advertising business for years. Indeed, the technology that underpins OpenAI’s ChatGPT actually came from Alphabet more than five years ago. But sometimes the market needs a reminder, and Alphabet provided tangible evidence of its capabilities. At a recent developer conference, it launched Bard, a consumer-oriented generative AI version of its search engine, as well as several other concrete examples of how AI could improve its current business. As with Meta, the long-term implications of AI on Alphabet’s business model are still far from certain. But we do believe that it is a technology leader in this field and will participate in whatever direction the technology develops.”

2. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 278

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $34,900,888,000

Market Capitalization: $1.35 trillion

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) generates and analyzes massive datasets from retail, web services, logistics, and other operations to drive business decisions. The company pioneered Big Data analytics and recommendations for e-commerce through technologies like DynamoDB, Redshift, and EMR. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides managed Big Data services like Kinesis, Glue, Athena, EMR, Redshift, and Quicksight for cloud-scale data processing. Amazon.com, Inc. uses one terabyte of customer purchase data to optimize customer experience and supply chain.

Here’s what White Falcon Capital Management said about Amazon.com, Inc. in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN): Amazon is a controversial investment. It had been ‘profitless’ for much of its existence and divided investors on the ultimate sustainability of the business model. We believe that Amazon has two very strong businesses – an e-commerce business (including ads) backed by a top-notch logistics network and an internet infrastructure business called AWS that is an oligopoly with Microsoft and Google. We believe Amazon has a superior culture that allows it to succeed in its various business lines. Importantly, Amazon is inflecting on free cash flow (FCF). We model that it will produce $6+ in FCF per share in three years. If this is valued at 3-3.5% FCF yield then Amazon is a $200 stock. Amazon also has a portfolio of venture bets (which consume a lot of capital), and all these are upside options for an investor.”

1. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 300

Value of Hedge Fund Holdings: $69,788,476,000

Market Capitalization as of September 25, 2023: $2.36 trillion

Microsoft Corporation is betting on Big Data analytics through Azure Synapse Analytics, which provides a cloud data warehouse for enterprise BI and analytics on massive datasets. It offers query acceleration using dedicated SQL pools. Meanwhile, Power BI is another tool provided by Microsoft Corporation that offers interactive data visualizations and business intelligence on big datasets.

Here’s what Harding Loevner said about Microsoft Corporation in its Q2 2023 investor letter:

“Most notably, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) was able to gain an immediate leadership position in generative Al by making a US$10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, earlier this year. Microsoft’s Bing search engine has since introduced ChatGPT into its web index data-a collection so large that it is rivaled by the dataset of only one other business in the world, Alphabet’s Google. Data are the feedstock of Al models, and an Al-enhanced search engine trained on so much data may attract more users to Bing, allowing Microsoft to sell more ads on the service. Microsoft is also adding generative Al to other products, including the Azure cloud service, enabling business customers who use Azure to easily integrate OpenAl models to glean more insights from their data and automate functions such as certain IT tasks. These added capabilities should motivate more businesses to migrate their data to the cloud and make Azure more competitive with Amazon.com’s AWS and Google Cloud.”

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