AI’s Global Impact and Market Projections
Top AI Stocks for 2024 : Artificial intelligence took the world by storm last year, with 35% of global companies utilizing AI in the workplace. Over 70% of those companies are researching how to leverage AI further in their business. One estimate puts the global market size of AI in 2032 at over $2.8 trillion, resulting in a Kager or compounded annual growth rate of 19% a year. To put that into context, if you invested $10,000 today and another $10,000 every year for eight years with a 19% Kager, you’d have over a quarter of a million dollars.
Top AI Stocks for 2024 – Trillion Dollar Value
As an investor, these are fantastic times to take advantage of this AI revolution. In this video, I’ll be going over the top seven AI stocks to invest in for the first quarter of this year. I say the first quarter because I’m pretty certain that the landscape is going to be changing drastically in AI throughout the year.
If you’re new to the channel, I’m Brian, and I retired at the age of 46 about a year or two ago. I worked my corporate jobs with companies like Target and Amazon, and if you’re interested, I covered a lot of my journey in this video right over here and why I retired early. With that, let’s get started with the top seven AI companies that have my attention right now.
Investor’s Opportunity in the AI Revolution
Please note there is an extensive list of AI companies to choose from, but I’m only highlighting the few that I think have long-term potential or make the most sense today. I’ll try my best to cover many of these other companies in future videos.
Now, within the scope of AI, there are essentially three main areas of focus for growth that I’m looking at: software, hardware, and web hosting for the backbone of those large language models or AI chatbots.
CrowdStrike: Cybersecurity in the AI Era
The first company to review is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that provides cloud protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyber attack response services. Their threat detection and deterrence are offered on their Falcon platform. As AI tools become more broadly available, it’s easier for cyber attackers to gain more tools and resources. The demand and the need for companies like CrowdStrike, I think, is only going to grow over time. I truly believe they’re going to have a long runway of growth ahead of them.
Here Top AI Stocks for 2024
Over the past year, the stock has gone up over 167%, but over the past three years, it’s up only 6.5%. It hasn’t even met up with its top price of $293, which it had back in 2021. So right there, we know that there’s some upside. An item to point out is that their revenue is over $2.2 billion, but they have a negative 8% margin. They’re only 13 years old, and they are on the verge of making a profit. Once they do, then I’m certain that that stock is going to take off. Given that their revenue growth has nearly doubled in the past few years, it has a lot of growth ahead of it. This is a company that I spoke about a few times last year, and it truly helped out my portfolio. I look at it as a long term fit for me.
Nvidia’s Dominance in AI Hardware
The next company is one that everyone should have in your portfolio, and that’s Nvidia. They’re known for their graphics cards, but their GPUs for AI servers are where they are truly the hottest ticket in town. So hot that it’s estimated that they have a 90% share of all AI GPUs. But despite all their recent growth, analysts still speculate that there is a lot of growth ahead of them. Since there are only a few players in the hardware part of AI with such dominance, they stand to be at the top of AI for quite a while. It’s hard to believe that they had a 228% growth last year and it was at 277% over three years. Their PDU ratio is pretty high at 64.
But with the AI growth happening right now, I don’t think anyone knows what the true ceiling is. Even though I bought heavily into Nvidia last year, I’m still investing quite a bit this year for the long term with cost value averaging.
Now there happens to be a competitor to Nvidia in the AI hardware space called Cerebris that has the industry shaken up because Cerebris is creating the largest supercomputer for AI called Condor Galaxy. This is created with Cerebris’ proprietary wafer scale engine, which is 27 million computer cores with 41 terabytes of memory made from one large wafer. Now, this is a company at the forefront of AI hardware, but unfortunately, they aren’t listed on the stock exchange. The only way to invest pre IPO is through an investment firm or from today’s sponsor Linkto, which is a platform dedicated to democratizing access to investing in pre-IPO fintech AI companies that aren’t really available to us everyday investors.
Linkto’s platform provides the resources to research several different AI companies not listed on the exchange, and it gives its customers the freedom to select the companies that they want to invest in, which isn’t always the case with some of those other investment firms. Linkto is already providing over 600,000 everyday investors access to private investing. My viewers get a $500 discount on their first investment using the discount code on the screen, available for the next 30 days as a limited promotion. Links are in the description below.
UiPath: Robotic Process Automation Software
The next AI company is UiPath, a software company that provides robotic process automation. Their software can observe, map, and optimize processes within a company. The beauty of it all is that they can bolt on top of a company’s existing legacy system. From there, it can provide near-immediate results of automation with a relatively low cost. I personally consult with larger companies all the time, and robotic process automation is extremely hot right now because all companies are looking for a competitive advantage and ways to reduce their costs.
The company had a great one-year return, but the three-year at negative 66% is horrible. Looking at the PDE ratio, you can see that it is operating at a negative margin. Their IPO was April of 2021, and it peaked at $84. It’s trading at about 27% of that today. It has come down to near bottom levels. This is another company that once the profits kick in, the stock price is quick to follow. I happen to put this one into my bucket of long-term investments where I don’t go all in, but I do keep investing in it whenever the stock takes a little bit of a dip.
Arista Networks: The Cinderella in AI Hardware
At the end of this video, I’m going to provide you a list of my priorities when it comes to investing in these companies. I’ll follow that up with Arista Networks, which develops, manufactures, and sells hardware and software tools for data centers and cloud computing. Essentially, they create the tools specific for managing and routing the communication of networks and cloud computing. As more companies build out or rely on AI cloud computing solutions, then Arista Networks is going to have a strong growth trajectory.
As for performance, they did amazing last year with a 111% growth and their three-year was also stellar. But with the beta and the PDE ratio being relatively low, they’re almost a value in the growth sector of AI. This is sort of my Cinderella within the group that not everyone is talking about. I happen to talk about a fair amount last year and I pounced on the stock, and they’ve been a stellar performer for me in the short term.
Amazon’s Diverse AI Opportunities
The next company is my prior employer, Amazon, where they have a lot going for them with regards to the health sector, their ad revenue, AWS, and their large language models for companies to train their own AI. This is where the need for computers to leverage Amazon’s AWS for cloud-based AI models will result in many years worth of growth. Currently, AWS makes up about 13% of Amazon’s revenue, but it accounts for 74% of the operating income.
On the retail side, their ad revenue had over a 26% growth in 2023. Now that Amazon’s going to be putting ads on their prime shows, then I expect that their ad revenue is going to jump drastically this year. In looking at the performance, the one year is decent at 69%, but the three year is abysmal at a negative 5%. When you look at the fact that the stock is way below its high of $185, I believe the next two years are going to be stellar due to the upside in margin. Keep in mind that they took massive layoffs last year and they killed most all of their physical store formats. They trimmed all the fat last year and they’ve refocused their investments going into 2024.
Palantir’s Complex AI Operating Systems
Before moving on, if you like my content, it’d be great if you’d consider subscribing. Next, I’ll follow that up with Palantir, which is a company that provides the most complex AI operating systems to tackle real-world high stakes problems. Their Foundry platform is a secure and scalable data fusion and analysis platform where it can take in structured and unstructured data to allow users to interact and analyze complex information on the fly. They offer the most comprehensive and complex AI system that I’ve ever seen. Any company that leans into their Foundry platform is going to create a massive competitive advantage.
I am genuinely impressed with their platform, and I’ve worked on some very complex AI pricing models while I was at Amazon that I guarantee most all of you interact with today. Believe me, Palantir’s AI systems are top-tier. As for Palantir’s performance, it was up 157% last year, but down quite a bit over the three years. Despite their beta and P to E ratio being the highest of anyone on the list today, they’re going to be a major player long-term with AI. Several analysts downgraded them recently and that’s okay because it opened up a major buy opportunity for the rest of us. This is another one of those companies that I’m not going to go all in, but I do keep investing on it regularly because I do think that they’re going to be great over the long term where no other company really offers the same AI solutions that they do at the same level.
I’ll follow that up with Microsoft. It seems weird to be calling out some of these huge companies to be at the top of the growth chart with AI, but many of them are creating the tools and the infrastructure for other companies to leverage their AI tools for consumption. With Microsoft’s Co-Pilot launching just a month or so ago, it is for larger companies where it costs $30 per person per month. That may seem excessively high, but if Co-Pilot can help write documents, design a PowerPoint from a set of bullet points, or analyze Excel documents with the touch of a button or summarize Teams meeting notes with calls to action and follow-ups, it will easily provide several hours worth of productivity per person per week. I’ve spoken to a few people that are using the AI Co-Pilot and they’ve referenced it to being on a drug. Now that they’re on it, they can’t imagine not having it.
Microsoft’s AI Integration in Office Products
One article speculates that Microsoft plans for 20% adoption of Co-Pilot by 2026, and it’s going to bring in $10 billion a year. But what if that number jumps to 30 or 40%? I think it’s impressive that Microsoft was able to completely change their model and infuse AI into their office products, all within a one-year timeframe. They literally need to write a case study about how that all went down because I would love to know. As for performance, they’re up 64% in one year and up a total of 75% over the three years. When you look at the low beta and P to E ratio in conjunction with the dividend, Microsoft is a value proposition right now.
Conclusion and Investment Priorities
As I mentioned earlier, I am going to show all those different companies on the screen and how I am prioritizing them within my investments. I appreciate you watching the video, and I do have a link to some affiliates that are giving away free stock potentially worth thousands of dollars if you sign up with their stock trading platform. It helps support the channel, and hey, you may wind up getting a few hundred dollars worth of stock.
Mitchell Marsh: A Journey of Dedication, Talent, and Resilience
