Investing

5 Surprising 'Strong Buy' Tech Stocks That Also Could End Up Huge AI Winners

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The massive market rally so far in 2023 has been driven largely by mega-cap technology companies that look like they will be the biggest winners in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. Companies like Nvidia have surged higher on the promise of generative AI, and while there is no question that the future is wide open, and the prospects are almost limitless, chasing the companies that have been the tailwind for the surge higher in the stock markets might not be the best plan now.
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At 24/7 Wall St., we decided to screen our AI technology database looking for companies that may be overlooked in the revolution that continues to grow in intensity seemingly every day. Five top technology stocks, which are all rated Buy at leading Wall Street firms, may provide an outstanding way for aggressive growth investors to join in on the AI trade without chasing some of the companies that have had parabolic moves higher.

Investors should remember that no single analyst report should be used as a sole basis for any buying or selling decision.

Adobe

This large cap legacy technology giant is a sleeper in the AI world. Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) operates as a diversified software company worldwide through the following three segments.

The Digital Media segment offers products, services and solutions that enable individuals, teams and enterprises to create, publish and promote content. Its Document Cloud is a unified cloud-based document services platform. The company’s flagship product is Creative Cloud, a subscription service that allows members to access its creative products. This segment serves content creators, workers, marketers, educators, enthusiasts, communicators and consumers.

The Digital Experience segment provides an integrated platform and set of applications and services that enable brands and businesses to create, manage, execute, measure, monetize and optimize customer experiences from analytics to commerce. This segment serves marketers, advertisers, agencies, publishers, merchandisers, merchants, web analysts, data scientists, developers and executives across the C-suite.

The Publishing and Advertising segment offers products and services, such as e-learning solutions, technical document publishing, web conferencing, document and forms platform, web application development and high-end printing, as well as Advertising Cloud offerings.

Adobe offers its products and services directly to enterprise customers through its sales force and local field offices, as well as to end users through app stores and through its website. It also distributes products and services through a network of distributors, value-added resellers, systems integrators, software vendors and developers, retailers and original equipment manufacturers.


Earlier this year Adobe revealed generative AI services for creative professionals and marketers. In the suite, there is Adobe Firefly, a new family of creative generative AI models focused initially on image generation and text effects.

BMO Capital Markets has a $570 target price on Adobe Systems. The consensus target is $537.04, and shares closed trading on Thursday at $516.88.

AMD

Shares of this global semiconductor company are down almost 19% year to date. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) offers x86 microprocessors and graphics processing units (GPUs) as an accelerated processing unit, chipsets, data center, and professional GPUs. It offers embedded processors and semi-custom system-on-chip (SoC) products, microprocessor and SoC development services and technology, data processing units, field programmable gate arrays and adaptive SoC products.
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AMD provides processors under the AMD Ryzen, AMD Ryzen PRO, Ryzen Threadripper, Ryzen Threadripper PRO, AMD Athlon, AMD Athlon PRO and AMD PRO A-Series brand names; graphics under the AMD Radeon graphics and AMD Embedded Radeon graphics, as well as professional graphics under the AMD Radeon Pro graphics brand name. In addition, the company offers data center graphics under the Radeon Instinct and Radeon PRO V-series brands, as well as servers under the AMD Instinct accelerators brand.

Last month the company unveiled its new Instinct MI300 chip series, which it claims is designed for speeding up processing for generative AI, and that is the technology used by ChatGPT and other chatbots.

Baird’s target price is $170, and Advanced Micro Devices stock has a $133.70 consensus target. The stock closed over 5% lower on Thursday at $110.25.

Atlassian

This could be one of the best hidden values in the entire group. Atlassian Corp. (NASDAQ: TEAM) designs, develops, licenses and maintains various software products worldwide.

Those products include:

  • Jira Work Management, a workflow management system for teams to plan, track, collaborate, and manage work and projects
  • Jira Service Management, a service desk product for creating and managing service experiences for various service team providers, including IT, legal and HR teams
  • Jira Align for enterprise organizations to build and manage a master plan that maps strategic projects to the various work streams required to deliver them
  • Opsgenie, an incident management tool that enables IT teams to plan for and respond to service disruptions
  • Confluence, a social and flexible content collaboration platform used to create, share, organize and discuss projects
  • Trello, a collaboration and organization product that captures and adds structure to fluid, fast-forming work for teams
  • Bitbucket, a code management and collaboration product for teams using distributed version control systems
  • Atlassian Access, an enterprise-wide product for enhanced security and centralized administration that works across every Atlassian cloud product used, including Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Trello and Bitbucket

Other products include Atlassian cloud apps, Bamboo, Crowd, Crucible, Fisheye, Halp, Sourcetree and Statuspage.

Atlassian Intelligence uses generative AI technology from OpenAI to create, summarize and extract information from content, enabling teams to accelerate their work. With Atlassian Intelligence, users can quickly summarize decisions and action items from meeting minutes and other data.
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KeyCorp has a Buy rating on the stock with a $205 price target, well above the consensus target. Atlassian stock closed almost 7% lower on Thursday at $175.64.

Marvell Technology

This chip maker is probably well under the AI radar but could be another big winner. Marvell Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MRVL) provides data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, spanning the data center core to network edge.

The company develops and scales complex SoC architectures, integrating analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing functionality. It offers a portfolio of Ethernet solutions, including controllers, network adapters, physical transceivers and switches; single or multiple core processors; custom application specific integrated circuits; and SoC solutions.

It also provides electro-optical products, including pulse amplitude modulations, coherent digital signal processors, laser drivers, trans-impedance amplifiers, silicon photonics and data center interconnect solutions; fiber channel products comprising host bus adapters and controllers; single or multiple core processors; storage controllers for hard disk drives and solid-state-drives; and host system interfaces, including serial attached SCSI, serial advanced technology attachment, peripheral component interconnect express, non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and NVMe over fabrics.

The company is modeling a stunning $400 million in AI sales this year and $800 million in 2024. Its Computing and AI applications have now grown to become the single largest revenue driver and opportunity for Marvell’s cloud-optimized silicon platform.

BofA Securities just added Marvell Technology stock to its US 1 list of top picks. The firm’s $80 target price is well above the $68.50 consensus target and Thursday’s close at $63.22.

Zscaler

This remains one of the hottest cybersecurity stocks and is a top pick across Wall Street. Zscaler Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS) operates as a cloud security company worldwide. Its offerings include the following:

  • Zscaler Internet Access solution provides users, workloads, IoT, and OT devices secure access to externally managed applications, including SaaS applications and internet destinations.
  • Zscaler Private Access solution is designed to provide access to managed applications hosted internally in data centers, and private or public clouds.

  • Zscaler Digital Experience measures end-to-end user experience across business applications, as well as provides an easy to understand digital experience score for each user, application, and location within an enterprise.
  • Posture Control solutions comprising Cloud Security Posture Management that identifies and remediates application misconfigurations in SaaS, infrastructure as a service and PaaS to reduce risk and ensure compliance with industry and organizational benchmarks.
  • Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management detects and remediates excessive or unused cloud permissions and enforces least privileged access without disrupting productivity.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) analyzes IaC templates to identify misconfigurations and other security issues prior to deployment to cloud infrastructure.
  • Vulnerability Scanning and Data Loss Prevention solutions.

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The company’s platform modules include Zscaler Central Authority, Zscaler Enforcement Node and Zscaler Log Servers.

Zscaler serves customers in airlines and transportation, conglomerates, consumer goods and retail, financial services, health care, manufacturing, media and communications, public sector and education, technology and telecommunications services industries.


The company recently announced newly advanced AI/ML innovations powered by the largest security cloud in the world for unparalleled user protection and digital experience monitoring. The new capabilities further enhance Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange security platform to enable organizations to implement a Security Service Edge that protects against the most advanced cyberattacks while delivering an exceptional digital experience to users and simplifying adoption of a zero trust architecture. Utilizing Zscaler’s AI-powered Zero Trust platform, organizations can now strengthen their network defense.

Zscaler stock has a $200 target price at Wells Fargo. The consensus target of $174.74 is also well above Thursday’s close of $147.90, which was down over 8% for the day.


The applications and uses for all forms of AI likely will continue to grow at a breathtaking pace. While the winners and losers will come and go, the entrenched technology leaders like these companies and others have the ability to continue to offer products and services that will make the revolution a lasting one. Plus, all these companies got caught in the Netflix/Tesla-driven Nasdaq sell-off Thursday and are offering even better entry points.

 

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