We recently compiled a list of the 11 AI News and Ratings You Should Take a Look At. In this article, we are going to take a look at where F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) stands against the other AI stocks.
KKR Global Head of Digital Infrastructure Waldemar Szlezak recently joined ‘Bloomberg Surveillance’ to discuss AI’s increasing energy demands and he sees AI as a lasting technological shift, comparable to electrification or the internet, rather than a “fad”. While short-term fluctuations may occur, he believes the overall trajectory remains strong. He also discussed how his firm is positioning itself to capitalize on this trend through data centers and power investments. While Nvidia’s latest earnings highlight AI’s momentum, Szlezak’s firm’s approach remains focused on infrastructure, especially in data centers and power generation.
Szlezak explained that his firm is shifting its data center strategy by emphasizing inference-based facilities near major population centers rather than large-scale training data centers. The firm currently owns five data center platforms across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with a recent expansion into the Middle East. Additionally, it is heavily investing in energy infrastructure, recognizing that AI’s rapid expansion will significantly increase electricity demand. He pointed to the firm’s $3 billion investment in a transmission network across multiple states as an example of how the firm is supporting power distribution.
The Future of AI Requires Major Energy and Data Center Upgrades
Waldemar Szlezak projected that global data center capacity could grow from 50 gigawatts to as much as 300 gigawatts, with a shift toward production inference workloads over training. Szlezak also highlighted AI-driven energy consumption trends, predicting that U.S. power demand could double, requiring trillions of dollars in infrastructure investments. While he acknowledged the risk of market speculation, he believes that securing enough energy supply and transmission capacity is the most significant challenge. His firm remains cautious about entering new data center ventures at elevated valuations but sees private capital playing an important role in building the infrastructure needed to support AI-driven industrial growth.
For this article, 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 Q4 database of over 1000 hedge funds.
At Insider Monkey we are obsessed with 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 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
A network engineer gazing intently at computer monitors, surrounded by servers and storage systems.
F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 37
F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) offers multi-cloud security and application delivery solutions for enterprises and governments.
On March 3, F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) announced that it has integrated its BIG-IP Next Cloud-Native Network Functions with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to improve network performance, security, and AI capabilities at the edge. The collaboration optimizes computing efficiency, reduces power usage, and improves traffic management for AI applications like autonomous systems and real-time monitoring. By using NVIDIA’s DOCA framework, F5 streamlines networking and security while supporting AI-RAN deployments, enabling mobile providers to maximize resource utilization and improve services.
Overall FFIV ranks 5th on our list of the AI stocks in the news and ratings. While we acknowledge the potential of FFIV 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 FFIV 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.
