We recently published a list of Top 10 AI Stocks on Investors’ Radar These Days. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) stands against other top AI stocks on investors’ radar these days.
The debate around AI systems hitting a “data wall” or plateau is heating up in the tech industry with many arguing that the performance of AI models is not showing signs of further improvement amid a lack of quality inputs, causing scaling issues in the industry.
CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa recently discussed this debate in a program and said:
“All it feels like anyone is talking about right now in tech is this debate over scaling laws and a data wall, which continues to rage in Silicon Valley. This is the idea that more data and bigger models will always lead to better AI, with some arguing that progress has peaked or is starting to plateau. Put another way, it’s a debate over a core assumption in AI that could have massive implications for the industry, from valuations to the GPUs powering it, and of course, the Nvidia story. I was at the Newcomer AI conference yesterday here in San Francisco. It was the theme of the day, with everyone from Scale AI’s Alexander Wang to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi weighing in.”
Jensen Huang was also asked about the issue of AI systems hitting a data wall and possible scaling issues in a latest earnings call. Here is what he said:
“A foundation model pre-training scaling is intact and it’s continuing. As you know, this is an empirical law, not a fundamental physical law, but the evidence is that it continues to scale. What we’re learning, however, is that it’s not enough that we’ve now discovered two other ways to scale. One is post-training scaling. Of course, the first generation of post-training was reinforcement learning human feedback, but now we have reinforcement learning AI feedback and all forms of synthetic data generated data that assists in post-training scaling.”
Read Huang’s comments in detail here.
Bosa mentioned some other tech leaders pushing back against the idea of AI hitting a data wall and said:
“…..also acknowledge that this alone isn’t enough to push AI further, and progress will come from post-training scaling, which is the development of AI applications on top of existing models. He and others say this will still require massive amounts of compute power.
An open question remains: will it be as much? A helpful way to frame that next phase of AI development is digestion or innovation. Maybe both are possible, but digestion might suggest a pullback on the huge amounts of spending and capital expenditures we’ve seen over the last few years. Innovation, on the other hand, could mean doubling down, with just another phase of development beginning. It’s still very much an open question.”
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Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 71
Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) shares recently gained after Wedbush Securities upgraded Snowflake, saying the AI revolution is “hitting the next phase.”
“The stalwart cloud/hyper scale players have been another instrumental part of this first phase of the AI Revolution, being led by Microsoft and now also seeing Google and Amazon finding major cloud and AI momentum in the field,” analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients. “Now [it’s] time for the broader software space to get in on the AI Party as we believe the use cases are exploding, enterprise consumption phase is ahead of us beginning in 2025, launch of LLM models across the board, and the true adoption of generative AI will be a major catalyst for the software sector and key players to benefit from this once in a generation 4th Industrial Revolution set to benefit the tech space. The AI Software era is now here in our view.”
The firm upgraded Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) to Outperform from Neutral and increased its price target to $190 and $135, respectively.
Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) is a Cloud-based data warehouse offering data storage and analytics services. Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW)’s moat lies in its data technologies that let companies analyze and make sense of unstructured data. Amid the generative AI boom, companies are ready to spend a fortune to use huge datasets to their advantage. This would bode well for Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW). The company’s usage-based pricing model also gives it an edge in the market. Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) expects the total addressable market for its Cloud data platform to rise to $342 billion by 2028, which is double the market size of 2023.
Baron Global Advantage Fund stated the following regarding Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) is a leading cloud data platform predominantly used for data analytics. Shares fell 15.2% in the third quarter due to a cybersecurity incident, a shifting competitive landscape, a change in leadership, and general macro complexities which are pressuring customer IT budgets. With generative AI (Gen AI) front and center, both investors and customers are closely evaluating Snowflake’s positioning in the future data ecosystem. Databricks and other competitors whose core users are data scientists who are also key buyers of Gen AI technologies, are benefiting. In addition, while Snowflake’s product innovation push should fuel future growth, it may also lead to short-term headwinds to profitability. Management reported healthy demand for its core data analytics, evidenced by solid growth rates among current customers alongside new go-to-market initiatives that could support growth. We are optimistic the new CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, can lead the company towards an AI-centric strategy, and therefore remain shareholders.”
Overall, SNOW ranks 8th on our list of top AI stocks on investors’ radar these days. While we acknowledge the potential of SNOW, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than SNOW but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
