We recently compiled a list of the 10 AI Stocks to Watch Amid the DeepSeek Buzz. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stands against the other AI stocks.
US stocks plummeted on Monday following the news of a new artificial intelligence app from a Chinese startup, DeepSeek. Major chip firms were amongst the hardest hit in the AI frenzy, erasing more than a trillion dollars in market cap. The AI model by DeepSeek, developed with fewer chips and lower costs, has sparked fear on Wall Street after it was known to outperform OpenAI’s ChatGPT on several benchmarks.
This frenzy was further fueled by the news that DeepSeek’s AI assistant app has become the most downloaded free app on the Apple store in the United States. Powered by DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek’s AI assistant has overtaken rival ChatGPT, the innovation by OpenAI that started the AI arms race in the first place.
READ NOW: 10 AI Stocks Making Waves on Wall Street and 11 AI Stocks That Should Be On Your Watchlist
Following the news of DeepSeek topping the charts, the Chinese startup said it will limit its registrations due to a cyber-attack. Before the attack, the company was also hit by a major outage on its website. According to the company’s status page, it had resolved issues relating to its application programming interface and users’ inability to log in to the website. This outage was known to be its longest in 90 days.
While the AI world remains in a state of panic, analysts have been having differing views on the innovation. Some are worried about its impact, while others are taking it on a positive note. Wedbush, for one, isn’t worried about DeepSeek disrupting the planned $2 trillion in capital expenditures anticipated on AI in the coming years. They say that they “view the DeepSeek fear across the tech world as in essence a ‘tech AI head fake’ that will be short-lived.
“DeepSeek created an awesome LLM model (and credit to its software developers) however this Chinese AI small lab/LLM model is not bringing down the entire US tech ecosystem with it”.
– The analysts wrote.
Raymond James believes that these AI innovations can reshape the tech world, lowering costs significantly and reducing the need for massive GPU/XPU clusters at US hyperscalers.
“If DeepSeek’s innovations are adopted broadly, an argument can be made that model training costs could come down significantly even at U.S. hyperscalers, potentially raising questions about the need for 1-million XPU/GPU clusters as projected by some”.
-Raymond James analyst Srini Pajjuri wrote in a note to clients over the weekend.
In turn, Web3 entrepreneur Jeffrey Emanuel is saying that DeepSeek’s success “suggests the entire industry has been massively over-provisioning compute resources”.
Then there are also some experts, such as one Oxford professor, who is advising against putting private data on the DeepSeek platform in case it could be shared with the Chinese state.
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).
A team of developers working in unison to create the company’s messaging application.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 235
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is a global technology company. On January 28, Citi reiterated its Buy rating on Meta Platforms Inc. with a price target of $753.00. Even though DeepSeek’s entry has shaken Wall Street, Citi analysts argued that it could mean good things for Meta. The analysts, led by Ronald Josey, assert that the DeepSeek model should lead to faster AI product development and yield a quicker return on investment. It said that since the r1 model from DeepSeek is open-source, it can be a lesson for the tech giants to learn from it and make their own tools more efficient.
“Given R1 is open source, our key takeaway here is that Meta (and others) can learn from R1 which should make its AI tools more efficient,” analysts wrote. “And while Meta has committed to $60-65BN of CapEx in ’25E, model efficiencies could suggest we are nearing peak CapEx spend as product cadence ramps.”
Overall META ranks 1st on our list of the AI stocks to watch amid the DeepSeek buzz. While we acknowledge the potential of META 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 META but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stock To Buy Now and Complete List of All AI Companies Under $2 Billion Market Cap.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
