International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) Unveils Breakthrough in Optics Technology to Revolutionize Generative AI and Data Center Efficiency

We recently compiled a list of the 10 AI Stocks Taking Wall Street by Storm. In this article, we are going to take a look at where International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) stands against the other AI stocks.

Wall Street’s major indexes closed lower on Monday, December 9th, dragged down by a decline in Nvidia. The plunge pressured the broader technology sector, with investors also turning their attention to an important inflation report due this week.

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Investors expect the consumer price index (CPI) data set to be released on Wednesday, while the producer price index (PPI) is anticipated on Thursday, ahead of the Federal Reserve’s meeting on Dec. 17-18.

The plunge, however, seems only temporary, and technology stocks are poised to gain in the future. BlackRock anticipates that infrastructure and cybersecurity investments will “shine” in 2025. Jay Jacobs, the firm’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, considers the artificial intelligence boom as a major catalyst. Jacobs said that AI companies need to build out their data centers and that keeping that data safe is also a sound investment play for the New Year.

“If you think about your data, you want to spend more on cybersecurity as it gets more valuable. We think this is really going to benefit the cybersecurity [and the] software community which is seeing very rapid revenue growth based off of this AI.”

Jacobs further stated that even though technology may seem tangible, it is also heavily reliant on physical infrastructure such as energy, materials like copper, and even real estate. These real-world components are essential for supporting the systems that are used every day. He further went on to say that it’s not just the mega-cap tech names that are winning, other semiconductor companies and other data center companies are benefiting from the rise of this theme.

In this regard, AI ETFs can play a significant role in helping investors gain targeted exposure while mitigating some of the risks associated with investing in individual AI stocks. They are a smart way for investors to invest in a theme for seeking longer-term gains.

“Identifying future winners can be very difficult – it’s not always the obvious names that make it in the long-term”.

-Ben Seager-Scott, chief investment officer at Forvis Mazars

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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).

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International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 56

International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) is a multinational technology company offering AI consulting services and a suite of AI software products. On December 9, the company announced that it has unveiled revolutionary research in optics technology that has the potential to improve how data centers train and run generative AI models. The process would enable co-packaged optics (CPO), the next generation of optics technology, to enable connectivity within data centers at the speed of light through optics that would complement existing short-reach electrical wires. The research innovation would enable various benefits including lower costs for scaling generative AI, faster AI model training, and increased energy efficiency for data centers.

“As generative AI demands more energy and processing power, the data center must evolve – and co-packaged optics can make these data centers future-proof. With this breakthrough, tomorrow’s chips will communicate much like how fiber optics cables carry data in and out of data centers, ushering in a new era of faster, more sustainable communications that can handle the AI workloads of the future.”

-Dario Gil, SVP and Director of Research at IBM.

Overall IBM ranks 5th on our list of the AI stocks that are taking Wall Street by storm. While we acknowledge the potential of IBM 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 IBM 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.