We recently published a list titled 10 Best AI Stocks With More Upside on $1.2 Trillion AI “Value Creation Opportunity”. Since Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) ranks 1st in the list, it deserves a deeper look.
UBS Global Wealth Management’s (GWM) recently published a detailed report discussing different layers of the AI “value chain,” estimating the combined market value opportunity from the layers at $1.2 trillion by 2027.
UBS segments the AI market into three layers – Enabling Layer, Intelligence Layer and Application Layer. The enabling layer is what actually powers the AI ecosystem — infrastructure, GPUs, data centers, Cloud, servers. UBS further divided this layer into two segments, Infrastructure and Cloud. The firm expects a combined $516 billion revenue opportunity from the enabling layer by 2027.
Next up is the intelligence layer, which acts as the brain of the entire AI ecosystem. Large language models and backed software systems sit at this layer. UBS estimates that this layer presents a $225 billion opportunity by 2027.
The third layer in the AI market highlighted by UBS is the application layer. This is where the end user comes in. Cloud, data centers, GPUs, LLMs and algorithms amount to nothing if the end user cannot benefit from their huge processing power. UBS said estimating monetization opportunity of this layer was the hardest since it’s still in its very early stage. The application layer addresses actual AI software used by customers — think AI assistants, GitHub CoPilot, marketing, customer service software, etc. UBS expects a whopping $395 billion in revenue opportunities for the application layer by 2027.
Key AI Predictions
The UBS report also made key “predictions” about the AI landscape. The firm’s analysts believe the race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) could give rise to a “capex cycle” that could “inflate” the AI investment bubble. UBS sees the dominance of a few companies in the AI industry will continue to be a reality moving forward, as it expects “monolithic players” and “AI foundries” prevailing in the near future.
Based on this report, let’s take a look at the top companies that will directly benefit from this $1.16 trillion opportunity by 2027. For this article we analyzed UBS analysis and picked 10 stocks that are directly exposed to the three layers in the AI ecosystem highlighted by UBS in its latest report. These companies are positioned extremely well to benefit from the monetization opportunities in the enabling, intelligence and application layers of the AI market. With each stock we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. 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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Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 302
Investment firm UBS in a latest report named Trainium and Inferentia as Amazon.com Inc’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) strengths in the AI Enabling layer to profit from the $1.16 trillion opportunity. Trainium is a machine learning (ML) chip that AWS purpose-built for deep learning (DL) training of 100B+ parameter models. Inferentia is an AI accelerator for deep learning (DL) and generative AI inference applications.
Amazon Web Services is another major factor that makes Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) well positioned in the Enabling layer of the AI value chain. However, UBS believes Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) doesn’t have any offering in the Intelligence layer of the AI value chain. The firm labeled “chatbot recommendations” as Amazon.com Inc’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) strength in the application layer of AI.
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is becoming an AI power house thanks to its AWS business, which saw operating margins cross 37% during the first quarter. AWS operating margins have now came in more than 30% for the past five straight quarters. Amazon.com Inc’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) revenue in the first quarter jumped 12.5% YoY and its adjusted EPS more than tripled. Revenue in North America and International segments grew as well. Analysts believe digital ads is another strong revenue stream for Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), with revenue from the segment increasing 24% YoY to $11.8 billion in the first quarter.
Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its first quarter 2024 investor letter:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is the world’s largest retailer and cloud services provider. Shares increased 18.7% on quarterly results that exceeded consensus expectations, with revenue growth of 13% year-over-year and operating margins of 7.8% (up from 1.8% a year ago). We believe that Amazon is well positioned in the short to medium term to continue improving its core North American margins, which have reached 6.1% in the fourth quarter, the seventh straight quarter of margin improvement and an overall improvement of 800bps. Amazon has been rearchitecting its fulfillment network, improving efficiency, reducing cost-to-serve and accelerating delivery speeds thanks to initiatives such as regionalization, with the number of items delivered during the same day or overnight increasing by nearly 70% year-over-year. Reducing the cost to serve also enables Amazon to sell lower priced items and expand its addressable market to everyday purchases. Additionally, Amazon continues to benefit from its fast-growing, margin-accretive advertising business winning market share in digital advertising thanks to its structural advantages of a closed loop system, which enables a deterministic calculation of Return on Ad Spending. We also believe that e-commerce still has long duration growth ahead as it still accounts for less than 15% of retail. Similarly, Amazon’s cloud service, AWS, remains relatively early in its S-curve with cloud representing around 13% of worldwide IT spending13 incremental tailwinds across the three layers of the GenAI stack – infrastructure with NVIDIA’s own AI chips (Trainium and Inferentia) as well as with its offering of NVIDIA chips, platform (Bedrock), and applications (first and third party).”
Overall, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) ranks 1st on Insider Monkey’s list titled 10 Best AI Stocks With More Upside on $1.2 Trillion AI “Value Creation Opportunity”. While we acknowledge the potential of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), 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 Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) 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.