AppLovin Corporation (APP): Piper Sandler Initiates Coverage with $400 Price Target, Highlights AI-Driven Growth

We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI Stocks to Watch: News and Analyst Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where AppLovin Corporation (NASDAQ:APP) stands against the other AI stocks.

As the “AI arms race” continues to evolve, countries are increasingly beginning to realize the efforts they need to expend to stay relevant. One such country in the picture that’s stepping up its efforts is Britain. On Monday, November 25, British cabinet office minister Pat McFadden warned that Russian cyber criminals are increasingly targeting countries that support Ukraine, directing that Britain and its NATO allies must stay ahead in the AI arms race. He also stated that neither Britain nor its allies will be intimidated by Russian cyber threats to stop supporting Ukraine.

READ NOW: 10 AI News Updates You Can’t Miss This Weekend and Jim Cramer’s Lightning Round: 9 Stocks in Spotlight

The remarks, given at the NATO Cyber Defence Conference in London, also unveil Britain’s plans to set up a new Laboratory for AI (artificial intelligence) security to help create better cyber defense tools and organize intelligence on attacks. McFadden also emphasized businesses and institutions to do “everything they can to lock their digital doors” to protect themselves from what he called an increasingly aggressive Russia.

“While no one should underestimate the Russian aggressive and reckless cyber threat to NATO, we will not be intimidated by it and we will never allow it to dictate our decisions or policies. And we will do everything we can to defend our countries against it”.

McFadden will be sitting down with British businesses to discuss how they can boost their security in a few days.

In other AI news, lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News have revealed that OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to a case their company was being sued on. News publishers The New York Times and Daily News had filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI. The legal proceedings required OpenAI to let the publishers look through its training datasets for any copyrighted content.

The search, which started on November 1st took a turn on November 14 when lawyers for the publishers alleged that search data stored on one of the virtual machines (after 150 hours of work) had vanished. While some data was recovered, it was without names and folder structure. The lawyers said it “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models”.

“News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time…The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today”.

-Lawyers said in a letter filed in a US district court on Wednesday, November 20.

OpenAI has been facing multiple lawsuits from publishers related to copyright infringement, even though it stands firm that it only trains its AI models on publicly available data.

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among 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).

A close-up of a mobile device, showing an advertiser reaching out to a consumer via a software-based platform.

AppLovin Corporation (NASDAQ:APP)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 51

AppLovin Corporation (NASDAQ:APP), a prominent marketing software company, leverages its AI-powered platform to provide targeted and automated marketing solutions.

On November 21, Piper Sandler analyst James Callahan initiated coverage of AppLovin Corporation (NASDAQ:APP) with an Overweight rating and a $400 price target. According to the analysts, Applovin’s shares have been “appropriately re-rated” after its AI-driven growth, but there is still an upside. They further state that the company’s technology has driven advertising revenue growth well above the market, and there is room to drive monetization and engagement higher as well. Piper further asserts that Applovin shares justify a premium valuation despite trading slightly above the group average.

Overall APP ranks 11th on our list of the AI stocks to watch. While we acknowledge the potential of APP as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some 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 APP but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock.

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