We recently published a list of Top 10 AI Stocks That Should Be On Your Watchlist for 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Applied Digital Corp (NASDAQ:APLD) stands against other top AI stocks that should be On your watchlist for 2025.
Investors are looking for new growth horizons in the AI industry to gauge whether the current market rally can continue for the years to come. Chetan Puttagunta, Benchmark general partner, said he’s noticed a lot of innovation in the past few weeks focused on improving the efficiency of algorithms.
“In the last six to eight weeks, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of innovation, especially at the model layer, and then for the last two years at the application layer, taking advantage of all the advances in the AI models. Specifically, what’s happening at the model layer is, as we move into an inference-time or test-time compute paradigm, you’re seeing a lot more advantage to entrepreneurs and technical founders that are able to push to the frontier with algorithmic innovation.”
To explain how AI is now actually improving workflows, Puttagunta gave the example of Sierra, a conversational AI startup making customer service solutions.
“So think of this Sierra AI agent, if you will, delivering the best customer service agent experience every time, replicated an infinite number of times. And that’s an experience that was previously not possible without AI.”
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For this article, we picked 10 AI stocks that are making moves amid the latest news. With each stock, we have mentioned its hedge fund sentiment. 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).
An overhead view of a large-scale data center with rows of servers and blinking lights.
Applied Digital Corp (NASDAQ:APLD)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 26
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) received an Overweight rating from Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm sees the company becoming a major operator of high-performance computing (HPC) data centers in the U.S. It set a $15 price target on the stock.
Applied Digital Corp (NASDAQ:APLD) is building an HPC data center in Ellendale, N.D., and recently energized its on-site main substation transformer. This milestone paves the way for commissioning equipment at the site.
“This achievement will allow the Company to initiate equipment commissioning activities, bringing us closer to delivering the infrastructure we believe will define the future of AI and digital transformation in Ellendale and beyond,” said Todd Gale, Chief Development Officer at Applied Digital Corp (NASDAQ:APLD).
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch noted that Applied Digital Corp (NASDAQ:APLD) is adopting a “build it and they will come” strategy, with ongoing lease negotiations involving “Hyperscaler 1.” Knoblauch estimates an 80% probability that the lease will be finalized by the end of January. If the deal falls through, securing a lease with another hyperscaler could take an additional two to three months.
Overall, APLD ranks 10th on our list of top AI stocks that should be On your watchlist for 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of APLD, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar 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 APLD 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.