We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks That Will Skyrocket. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stands against other AI stocks that will skyrocket.
Enterprise AI is expected to Drive Earnings in 2025
Some investors are heavily scrutinizing Big Tech’s AI spending. Despite these hefty expenditures, Big Tech has been enjoying solid revenues and earnings growth. Yung-Yu Ma, CIO at BMO Wealth Management, recently joined Yahoo Finance to shed light on the overall AI sector outlook heading into 2024.
Ma believes that companies are increasing their investments in AI in anticipation of higher returns. He said that it makes sense that the market is less likely to be enthusiastic about this situation. Ma argued that while spending on AI is likely to increase, there is a certainty that the results will soon show, maybe by the end of 2025.
He added that the market will probably see healthy earnings growth in 2025. Spending is broadly going to drive these earnings, particularly AI and its different use cases such as data centers, electricity grids, and other infrastructure. He expects an overall growth in valuation and shared that Big Tech is extremely confident and committed to pouring investment into the sector.
A Glance at Some Revolutionary AI Startups
2024 has been quite a year for artificial intelligence. Existing startups like Anthropic and Databricks have been performing exceptionally well and transforming the industry.
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company behind the OpenAI rival, Claude. On November 24, Anthropic extended its partnership with AWS, involving another $4 billion investment, bringing the total to $8 billion. The partnership also positions AWS as Anthropic’s primary cloud and training partner. Keeping up with the partnership, on December 4, Anthropic began optimizing Claude models to be able to run on AWS Trainium 2.
Databricks, the data and AI company, is another AI startup crucial to the AI revolution. Some of the products by Databricks include data management solutions, data warehousing, real-time analytics, data sharing, and data governance. The company is expanding to new heights. On November 6, the company partnered with KT Corporation to boost data and AI innovation in Korea. Following the trend, on November 20, Databricks announced it saw 70% annualized growth in its French business and has launched a new office in central Paris.
Our Methodology
To come up with AI stocks that will skyrocket, we consulted media reports to shortlist stocks that are expected to perform exceptionally well according to analysts and strategists. After consulting 10 similar rankings on the internet we examined the Street-High upside for each stock and picked the ones with the highest upside, as of December 3, 2024. Our list is in ascending order of the street high upside as of December 3, 2024. We have also mentioned the hedge fund sentiment for each stock.
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 development team working together to create the next version of Windows.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Street High Upside as of December 3, 2024: 39%
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 279
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) ranks eighth on our list of the AI stocks expected to skyrocket. In November alone, the company has introduced several key partnerships and products. On November 13, the company launched new and improved adapted AI models expanding its position in various industries. The new models will help organizations address their particular AI needs with greater efficacy and will readily be available through the Azure AI model catalog.
Similarly, on November 14, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) partnered with Accenture and Avanade to help businesses transform their functions using artificial intelligence and Microsoft Copilot. More recently, on November 19, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced that is it building three trusted platforms aimed at maximizing the benefits AI could reap for overall business functionality and efficiency.
Overall, the company is seeing strong financial outcomes from its AI-driven transformation and witnessing a significant uplift in the number of customers using its AI platforms and tools. Overall, cloud revenue in the fiscal first quarter of 2025 reached $38.9 billion, up by 22% year-over-year. Most of the revenue was driven by advances in artificial intelligence, explaining why 279 hedge funds were bullish on the stock at the close of Q3 2024, according to our Insider Monkey database.
Baron Opportunity Fund stated the following regarding Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is the world’s largest software and cloud computing company. Microsoft was traditionally known for its Windows and Office products, but over the last five years it has built a $147 billion run-rate cloud business, including its Azure cloud infrastructure service and its Office 365 and Dynamics 365 cloud-delivered applications. Shares gave back some gains from strong performance over the first half of this year. For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, Microsoft reported a strong quarter with total revenue growing 16%, in line with the Street; Microsoft Cloud up 22%; Azure up 30%; 43% operating income margins; and 36% free cash flow margins. Core Azure growth came in one point shy of expectations, however, due to a soft European market and continued constraints on AI compute capacity. In the same vein, while Microsoft reiterated its fiscal 2025 targets of double-digit top-line and operating income growth, quarterly guidance called for Azure growth to slow a bit before accelerating in the back half of the fiscal year, as capital expenditures increase, yielding an expansion of AI compute capacity. We believe this investment is a leading indicator for growth, with more than half of the spend related to durable land and data center build outs, which should monetize over the next 15-plus years. We remain confident that Microsoft is one of the best-positioned companies across the overlapping software, cloud computing, and AI landscapes, and we remain investors.”
Overall, MSFT ranks 8th on our list of AI stocks that will skyrocket. While we acknowledge the potential of MSFT to grow, our conviction lies in the belief that certain AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MSFT 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.