We recently compiled a list of the 10 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Now. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) stands against the other hidden AI stocks.

Collaborative Partnerships in AI

Research and development in artificial intelligence began in academia and dominated the sector until the early 2000s. Later, this pattern switched up and industry took over AI with higher investment, research, and cheaper inputs. Investments in AI by businesses are also almost always followed by commercial applications, making it a more profitable activity than academia.

While these commercial relationships flourish, many companies focus on taking collaborative approaches to partnerships, revolutionizing the AI industry. By partnering with tech giants, such companies are accelerating AI adoption, driving vertical growth through specialized models, and increasing demand for powerful computing resources. This strategic approach is shaping the future of AI.

This was recently discussed in another article, 7 Most Popular AI Penny Stocks Under $5. Here’s an excerpt from it:

“OpenAI’s approach to fostering collaborative partnerships instead of competing directly with tech giants makes it an exceptional model. Macquarie’s Fred Havemeyer (lead software equity research analyst) praised GPT 4 for its “emotional intelligence”. The growing demand for AI chips, exemplified by OpenAI’s use of over 1.7 trillion parameters in its GPT 4 model, will further help NVIDIA and other AI chip manufacturers grow.

On August 20, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is releasing a feature that will allow businesses to use their company data to customize GPT 4 so that it can be trained on additional information for niche tasks. This is an example of letting companies fine-tune the AI model to act as a customer-service chatbot for their subject areas. According to DeepL CEO, Jarek Kutylowski, specialised AI models are essential for companies to grow vertically.”

Ever since it was founded in 2015, this research company has promoted open research and collaboration within the AI community. By sharing its findings and models, OpenAI encourages other researchers and organizations to build upon its work. This has accelerated advancements in AI and fostered a more inclusive environment.

OpenAI partnered with Microsoft so that the tech giant’s investment ($1 billion in 2019) could facilitate deep integration of OpenAI’s models into its products. Azure offers these models as compliance-ready solutions, crucial for industries requiring high data security.

This was also followed by Brazil’s partnership with the tech giant to use OpenAI to reduce judicial costs. By automating tasks, the Brazilian judiciary is expediting case processing and improving efficiency, saving costs in public sectors.

In a recent discussion on CNBC, Barton Crockett from Rosenblatt Securities and Amit Daryanani from Evercore ISI both agreed that AI is crucial for Apple’s future success. Crockett emphasized that AI offers a unique opportunity to reinvigorate The company’s device ecosystem and that consumers are increasingly valuing AI capabilities in their tech devices, and it seems to be falling behind in this regard. He suggested that partnerships with AI companies like OpenAI could help it bridge this gap and enhance its offerings.

According to reports from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is reportedly seeking significant new funding, potentially valuing the company at over $100 billion. The investment round, led by Thrive Capital, highlights the intensifying competition among tech giants for a dominant position in the AI industry.

In August 2024, WebProNews reported that OpenAI’s user base doubled to over 200 million in a year and its annual revenue exceeded $2 billion. Over 90% of Fortune 500 companies now use OpenAI products. However, maintaining lead requires addressing practical, safety, and user-friendliness concerns. OpenAI’s plans, including its new search engine, SearchGPT, aim to address these challenges and solidify its position. CEO Sam Altman believes SearchGPT can significantly improve search capabilities.

These instances leave us thinking about whether it’s collaboration or competition that can help AI progress fastest. As the Managing Partner at Boldsquare, Dylan Jones points out, strategic partnerships can significantly impact a company’s valuation. Tech giants’ moves indicate a calculated effort to maintain their AI leadership, even if it means blurring the lines between collaboration and competition.

In a discussion at CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’, CoreWeave co-founder and CEO, Mike Intrator, said that the demand for AI infrastructure is relentless and has been in a state of severe disequilibrium for the past 2.5 years.

He believes that the demand for Nvidia chips is skyrocketing, while the rest of the industry is trying to keep up with it, including CoreWeave. According to Intrator, CoreWeave and its clients anticipate significant growth in AI infrastructure demand. Due to limited industry capacity, clients are struggling to train and serve AI models. CoreWeave, with its ability to provide large-scale AI infrastructure, is well-positioned to meet this growing demand.

However, startups often suffer at the cost of these partnerships, failing to compete with tech giants. Still, many companies are emerging and progressing at a good pace. In this context, we are here with a list of the 10 hidden AI stocks to buy now.

Methodology

To compile our list, we reviewed media reports and watched Wall Street analysts’ interviews to determine under-the-radar and hidden AI stocks. We compiled a list of 20 potential stocks and selected the 10 most popular among elite hedge funds that are expected to be key beneficiaries of the secular trends in artificial intelligence. The stocks are ranked in ascending order of the number of hedge funds that have stakes in them, as of Q2 2024.

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).

Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 92

Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) is a prominent independent power producer company that uses 400+ AI models to optimize operations, improve customer service, analyze energy usage data, predict demand, and optimize grid management.

It operates as an integrated retail electricity and power generation company and delivers essential energy resources to households, businesses, and communities. The surge in AI data center demand has promoted this company’s growth. It is also the largest independent power producer (IPP) in Texas, well-positioned to serve the state’s growing data center market.

In March, the company acquired Energy Harbor for $3.43 billion, a nuclear power and retail energy business. This deal added around 4,000 MW of nuclear capacity and 1 million retail customers to the company portfolio, making it the owner of the second-largest competitive nuclear fleet in the US.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Vistra Corp.’s (NYSE:VST) request to extend the operation of its Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant through 2053, an additional 20 years beyond the original license, continuing reliable generation of zero-carbon electricity from this 2,400-MW facility.

In the US, which houses a significant share of these data centers, electricity use is forecasted to increase from 200 TWh in 2022 to 260 TWh by 2026. This is a 6% surge in the nation’s total power consumption.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers that used 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2022 are expected to see their energy needs double to over 1,000 TWh by 2026. The total energy share of data centers is expected to increase by 3%-10% in the coming years.

Its AI-powered Heat Rate Optimizer (HRO) is deployed across 67 power-generation units and has achieved an average 1% improvement in efficiency, resulting in annual cost savings of over $23 million. This technology helped reduce carbon emissions, contributing to the goal of achieving a 60% reduction by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

In the second quarter of 2024, the company saw an overall 20.57% year-over-year improvement in revenue. The company is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing power demand. 92 hedge funds are long in the company as of June 30, and the largest stake is valued at $587,931,842 by Lone Pine Capital.

Legacy Ridge Capital stated the following regarding Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:

“One of the sectors we know well which had been out of favor for several years has quickly come into favor: Independent Power Producers (IPPs). We’ve written consistently about NRG and Vistra Corp. (NYSE:VST) since the 2019 letter, have owned each, or both, since 2018, and invested a meaningful amount of our assets in VST specifically the past few years. Nate and I intend on spending more time in the year-end letter on our updated views on the IPPs and our learnings from the on-going investment, but we were a bit surprised how quickly the narrative around these companies changed. Our Blue Sky 2030 estimates of intrinsic value converged with the share price 6-years before we thought probable. In the 2019 letter, with respect to VST, we wrote:

“Over the next decade management should have close to $15 Billion to deploy to share repurchases. If you assume they have to pay an average price for the stock that’s higher than the current one, and they can only repurchase 60% of shares outstanding instead of the 100% the math implies, FCF per share in 2030 would be $14. That’s a $70 stock at today’s valuation, but a $140 stock at a more reasonable FCF yield of 10%.” And… “The IPPs are un-investable for most money managers, so there we are. When they become investable we’ll probably be long gone.”

We’re not exactly long gone, but sentiment has certainly surpassed investable. After 5+ years of VST trading between $17 – $26 a share—and $26 exactly a year ago—it hit a high of $107 in May on the heels of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) narrative and the implications for electricity demand. While we agree with the prevailing consensus view that more Data Centers will be built, Data Centers require base load energy, and that the US will probably be short base load energy, predicting the rate of any technological advancement is not our area of expertise, and we feel the margin of safety has dissipated. Therefore, what had been our largest position entering 2023 and 2024, and has been our greatest contributor to performance, is now one of the smaller positions in the fund.”

Overall VST ranks 3rd on our list of the hidden AI stocks to buy. While we acknowledge the potential of VST as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold great promise for delivering high returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than VST 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.