The machines are taking over.
Artificial intelligence — better known as AI — is undergoing a renaissance right now. After years of under-the-radar research, AI is making its way to an application near you. The possibilities are nearly endless; from self-driving cars to credit card fraud flagging to playing Jeopardy, AI is being deployed in countless new ways.
While we don’t need to worry about Skynet just yet, some of those machine learning applications are less noble.
At the same time, others are positively life changing.
Odds are the products you use today already rely on AI, even if you don’t realize it. Google, for instance, has been using deep learning for scores of real-world applications.
While many large companies have been investing heavily in AI in recent years, investing in this trend remains difficult. That’s because AI currently makes up such a small component of most companies’ revenues that it’s difficult to pick out the ones that could truly move the needle.
We’re taking a closer look at the tech to find the two stocks that stand to benefit from the rising adoption of artificial intelligence tech more than their peers.
Alphabet Inc.
Up first is Alphabet Inc. (GOOG). Like its big technology peers, Alphabet has been investing heavily in AI and machine learning, but this firm’s exposure to the trend is higher than most.
For instance, the firm’s 2014 acquisition of British artificial intelligence company DeepMind gave it exposure to a firm applying AI tech at the bleeding edge. DeepMind’s research is already being implemented at Google, where the technology has helped to reduce Google’s datacenter cooling costs by 40%, and to generate voices for the Google Assistant.
Alphabet also profits from the adoption of AI outside of its companies. Google’s TensorFlow machine learning framework has become the de facto standard for deep learning, and its integration with the Google Compute Engine service gives Google Cloud an edge over other infrastructure-as-a-service providers who are battling in an increasingly commoditized space.
The introduction of TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) acceleration for neural network machine learning adds to Google Cloud’s edge in the machine learning space, particularly because TPUs won’t be sold commercially. They’re only available through Google Cloud.
Nvidia Corp.
While Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) has received a lot of attention lately from the cryptocurrency craze, Nvidia is also one of the biggest beneficiaries from the increasing popularity of machine learning.
This has nothing to do with video games.
That’s because Nvidia invested heavily in creating CUDA for its GPUs, a platform that enables machine learning acceleration on Nvidia hardware. The datacenter business has been one of Nvidia’s fastest-growing segments in recent years, as more commercial GPU users come online. Today all of the major cloud computing services offer computing time on Nvidia GPUs, and AI-specific chips like Nvidia’s Titan V are finding difficulty keeping up with on-premise customer demand.
As big data gets even bigger, demand for high-powered Nvidia hardware should continue to swell.
