Applied Digital Corporation (APLD): Sustainable Data Centers for AI and High-Performance Computing

We recently published a list of 10 AI News And Ratings on Wall Street’s Radar. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Applied Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:APLD) stands against other AI news and ratings on Wall Street’s radar.

The launch of China’s DeepSeek AI app is prompting investors to question top AI US companies about their high capital spending over the years and negligible returns to show for it. Founded by former hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s r1 AI model is emerging as an alternative to ChatGPT’s o1 and Anthropic’s Claude AI models.

Furthermore, the Chinese company developed the open-source r1 AI model at a fraction of the costs for ChatGPT. It is estimated that the DeepSeek r1 model is 20 to 50 times more affordable to use than OpenAI’s o1 model, depending on the task.

Despite the lack of the latest GPUs and massive investments due to US export controls, DeepSeek achieved a significant milestone through innovative resource optimisation and maximizing software potential.

“DeepSeek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.com. “But mostly we are excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission.”

As DeepSeek continues to disrupt the global tech sector, companies across industries continue to achieve transformative breakthroughs. This article details the latest analyst stock ratings and upgrades on trending AI companies involved in quantum computing, renewable energy, biotech, AI cloud, and automotive firms.

We selected AI stocks by reviewing news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. We listed the stocks in ascending order of their hedge fund sentiment taken from Insider Monkey’s database of 900 hedge funds.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Applied Digital Corp (APLD): Sustainable Data Centers for AI and High-Performance Computing

An overhead view of a large-scale data center with rows of servers and blinking lights.

Applied Digital Corp. (NASDAQ:APLD)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 26

Applied Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:APLD) designs, constructs, and operates data centers and offers cloud services for AI to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-performance computing. The company also focuses on constructing data centers near renewable energy sources as part of its sustainability goals to lower the carbon footprint of high-power computing.

On January 28th, Compass Point analyst Joe Flynn initiated coverage of Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) with a “Buy” rating and a $10 stock price target. The brokerage firm, which acknowledges that its target price implies a 50% upside following the 28% selloff in the stock yesterday related to the DeepSeek disruption, believes the risk-reward of signing a 100MW-400MW lease with a hyperscaler this year is more lucrative. Furthermore, the company’s Macquarie Asset Management Equity Partnership will also help secure a lease “over the finish line.” Following the selloff, analysts see “an interesting opportunity to again buy into the stock to play the HPC datacenter lease signing catalyst,” adding the upside opportunity “looks binary based on whether APLD can sign a 400MW lease in 2025 or not.” Compass Point noted that using a 60%/40% probability gets to an expected value above the current stock price with a “free option” on the pipeline beyond 400MW.

Overall, APLD ranks 5th on our list of  AI news and ratings on Wall Street’s radar. While we acknowledge the potential of APLD as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than APLD but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and Complete List of 59 AI Companies Under $2 Billion in Market Cap

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.