We recently published a list of Analysts are Recommending These 10 AI Semiconductor Stocks Despite Selloff. Since Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC) ranks 9th on the list, it deserves a deeper look.
Despite the concerns around AI stock valuations, some analysts believe companies are just getting started with the AI revolution and have a long runway for this bull run. Last month Cantor Fitzgerald analysts said in a note that AI semiconductor companies were positioned well heading into the second-quarter earnings season. They also said strengths in NAND and HDD markets and fiscal discipline make data storage companies attractive.
“We continue to believe that AI-leveraged names are still the most attractive to own heading into earnings,” Cantor analysts led by C.J. Muse said.
Cantor’s analysts said that companies that make semiconductor equipment are still in the early cycle of recovery.
“We are now five quarters into the recovery versus the average typical cycle of nine quarters and believe this cycle will be even more elongated,” they said.
Deutsche Bank also expects strong performance from AI-driven semiconductor stocks in the second-quarter earnings season. However, the firm observes that investors are becoming more selective. Analyst Ross Seymore highlighted that while optimism persists around the current AI leaders, there is growing caution about which companies will sustain or begin to show financial gains amid lingering uncertainty about the momentum’s longevity.
Melissa Weathers, another Deutsche Bank analyst, noted that semiconductor stocks have surged by 10-20% or more since the beginning of the second quarter, with price-to-earnings ratios approaching or exceeding previous highs. She emphasized that future upward movement will likely depend on revisions to earnings estimates.
For this article we picked 10 AI semiconductor stocks Deutsche Bank and Cantor Fitzgerlad are bullish on. 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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Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 65
Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC) is one of the top semiconductor picks of Cantor Fitzgerald. The company recently reported quarterly results. Cloud segment revenue jumped 20% on a sequential basis. Overall, the company is seeing a rise in profits amid higher pricing and a shift to premium high-performance products. The cloud business, particularly in high-capacity HDDs for data centers, remains strong.
What are AI-related growth catalysts for Western Digital? How can an SSD and storage devices company be called an AI stock?
The rise of artificial intelligence and its data demands positively impact both HDD and flash demand. Generative AI apps and machine learning require substantial data storage, a tailwind for Western Digital. The company is well-positioned to capitalize on this trend, which is still in its early stages.
During fiscal Q3 earnings call the company’s management talked about AI-related business trends:
“I would say about the AI demand as it’s coming into focus. I don’t think it’s so much in the results just yet, but we’re seeing where it’s going to impact both businesses. And clearly, one of them you just outlined, which is we’re seeing enterprise SSD demand return, we saw some increase in the last quarter. We expect some increase in this quarter. But really, as we look to the second half, we have customers coming to us wanting the kind of SSDs we built and qualified before the downturn. They just want them in much bigger capacity points, 30 and 60 terabyte capacity points. So it’s the same product just taking it and increasing capacity and going through a qualification on that so we’re in that process with customers.
We also introduced a new SSD that’s more compute focused, which is PCIe Gen 5 product based on BiCS 6, very high performance that plays a little bit different role in the AI training stack and we’re getting very good feedback on that product. It’s being qualified by our starting qualification, we samples. We’re kind of getting rid of the qualification of the hyperscaler and we’re seeing good demand in the enterprise market as well. So we feel like the portfolio set up well as we go into the second half, and we’re seeing a lot of demand show up for people that are very building large amount of infrastructure for model training.”
Overall Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC) ranks 9th on Insider Monkey’s list Analysts are Recommending These 10 AI Semiconductor Stocks Despite Selloff. While we acknowledge the potential of Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC), our conviction lies in the belief that 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 WDC 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.