In this article, we discuss the 5 best big data stocks to buy now. If you want to read a detailed analysis of the Big Data industry, you can go directly to the 13 Best Big Data Stocks To Buy Now.
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. (NYSE:CRM) 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. (NYSE:CRM) 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 (NASDAQ:NVDA) 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 (NASDAQ:NVDA) 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 (NASDAQ:NVDA) 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. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) 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. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) 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. (NASDAQ:AMZN) 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. (NASDAQ:AMZN) 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 (NASDAQ:MSFT) 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 (NASDAQ:MSFT) that offers interactive data visualizations and business intelligence on big datasets.
Here’s what Harding Loevner said about Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) 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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