마이크론은 우리가 주목해야 할 AI 주식(2024.08.16)

2024.08.16

미국 시간 8월15일 마이크론의 주가는 106.95달러, 시총은 1186억달러(X1350원=160조원).

 

Micron Technology, Inc. (MU) Stock Price, News, Quote & History - Yahoo Finance

 

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Micron Technology (MU): An Important AI Stock You Should Pay Attention To (yahoo.com)

 

We recently compiled a list of the 33 Most Important AI Companies You Should Pay Attention To. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) stands against the other important AI stocks.

 

다음은 최근 우리가 선정한 "주목해야 할 33개의 가장 중요한 AI 기업" 목록에 대한 기사입니다. 이 기사에서는 Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU)가 다른 중요한 AI 주식들과 비교하여 어떤 위치에 있는지 살펴보겠습니다.

 

Artificial intelligence has led to a much-needed market rally in the technology industry over the past year. The benchmark S&P 500, dominated by tech giants, is up nearly 20% in the past year. The tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite is up over 21%. In light of easing inflation numbers and rate cuts, market analysts had forecast a jump in interest around growth options for 2024.

인공지능(AI)은 지난 1년간 기술 산업에서 필요했던 시장 반등을 이끌어냈습니다. 기술 대기업들이 주도하는 S&P 500 지수는 지난 1년 동안 거의 20% 상승했으며, 기술 중심의 NASDAQ 종합지수는 21% 이상 상승했습니다. 물가 상승률이 완화되고 금리 인하가 이루어지면서 시장 분석가들은 2024년 성장 옵션에 대한 관심이 증가할 것으로 예측했습니다. 

 

However, the AI buzz has served to snowball this ordinary interest into an extraordinary wave of optimism around the whole economy. Although tech stocks have been the biggest beneficiary, there is little doubt that AI will soon penetrate other sectors of the economy, from manufacturing and supply chain, to transportation, entertainment, and retail.

 

그러나 AI에 대한 관심이 이 평범한 관심을 경제 전반에 걸친 비상한 낙관주의의 물결로 확장시켰습니다. 기술 주식이 가장 큰 수혜를 입었지만, AI가 곧 제조업 및 공급망, 운송, 엔터테인먼트, 소매업 등 다른 경제 부문에도 침투할 것이라는 데에는 의심의 여지가 없습니다.

 

There are numbers that illustrate this argument in quantifiable terms. Across the economic spectrum, investments in AI are increasing at a rapid pace. For example, according to a recent report on the AI industry by renowned investment bank Goldman Sachs, established businesses around the world are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on developing AI infrastructure in the coming years.

 

이 주장을 수치적으로 입증하는 숫자들이 있습니다. 경제 전반에 걸쳐 AI에 대한 투자가 빠르게 증가하고 있습니다. 예를 들어, 유명한 투자 은행 골드만 삭스의 최근 AI 산업 보고서에 따르면, 전 세계의 기존 기업들이 향후 몇 년 동안 AI 인프라 개발에 거의 1조 달러를 지출할 것으로 예상됩니다. 

 

Investments in AI startups are also booming. So far in 2024, venture capital firms have made around 200 deals with AI firms, investing nearly $22 billion. The average size of a round of funding for AI startups is more than $100 million with an average valuation of more than $1 billion. In contrast, these numbers for non-AI startups are $20 million and $200 million.

 

AI 스타트업에 대한 투자도 급증하고 있습니다. 2024년 현재까지 벤처 캐피털 회사들은 AI 기업들과 약 200건의 거래를 체결하며 거의 220억 달러를 투자했습니다. AI 스타트업의 한 라운드 펀딩 평균 규모는 1억 달러 이상이며, 평균 기업 가치는 10억 달러를 넘습니다. 반면, 비-AI 스타트업에 대한 이 숫자는 각각 2천만 달러와 2억 달러입니다.

 

Key players who were early to catch on to the AI trend have leapfrogged competitors. Stocks of companies that make graphics processing units (GPUs), specialized AI chips, and generative AI products have soared. In general, the median returns of AI-linked firms on the S&P 500 are 20% compared to 2% for non-AI stocks. On the NASDAQ Composite, AI firms are responsible for 90% of the overall returns on the border index. Analysts expect these gains to translate into earnings and GDP growth. Joseph Briggs, a senior global economist at Goldman Sachs, argues that in the next ten years, AI is likely to automate 25% of all work tasks and raise US productivity by 9% and GDP growth by more than 6%.

 

 

AI 트렌드를 일찍 포착한 주요 기업들은 경쟁자를 뛰어넘는 성과를 거두었습니다. 그래픽 처리 장치(GPU), 특수 AI 칩, 생성 AI 제품을 만드는 기업들의 주가는 급등했습니다. 일반적으로 S&P 500 지수에서 AI와 연관된 기업들의 중간 수익률은 20%로, 비-AI 주식의 2%와 비교됩니다. NASDAQ 종합지수에서는 AI 기업들이 전체 수익의 90%를 차지하고 있습니다. 분석가들은 이러한 수익이 향후 수익 및 GDP 성장으로 이어질 것으로 예상합니다. 골드만 삭스의 수석 글로벌 경제학자인 조셉 브릭스는 향후 10년 동안 AI가 모든 작업의 25%를 자동화하고, 미국의 생산성을 9% 높이며 GDP 성장을 6% 이상 끌어올릴 가능성이 있다고 주장합니다.

 

Research presented in the keynote address to the 2024 EMW Conference by Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management suggests that these gains may be the beginning of a new super cycle for the tech industry, following previous cycles such as PCs in the 1980s, networking in the 1990s, wired internet in the 2000s, and mobile internet in the 2010s that led to the popularity of the cloud. However, investors have more reason to be optimistic about this growth since it compares favorably to cycles of the past. Software and internet experts Kash Rangan and Eric Sheridan contend that tech companies seem to be investing in AI products by tying the spending to the revenues, ensuring a safety net that had not existed in previous cycles.

Since the beginning of the AI wave in early 2023 following the launch of ChatGPT by California-based Open AI, the focus of the industry has shifted from software towards AI hardware and infrastructure. AI infrastructure firms have added nearly $6 trillion to their market capitalization since the first quarter of 2023. Before a killer AI application can emerge or large scale AI automation can begin - Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-American economist at MIT, predicts this will take more than a decade - new areas of AI infrastructure are emerging. These include utilities, energy, internet, and industrials (see 20 Industrial Stocks That Are Already Riding the AI Wave). The gains of prominent utility, industrial, energy, and internet firms critical to AI development rival the returns of traditional AI stocks.

 

Investments in energy and utilities are important if this AI potential is to be realized. Goldman analysts Carly Davenport and Alberto Gandolf expect the proliferation of AI technology and the accompanying need to maintain data centers to drive an increase in demand for utilities that has not been seen in a generation. It remains to be seen, however, if the pace at which AI is progressing will keep pace with investments in power. This is because the utilities sector is highly regulated and has supply chain constraints that will not be easily overcome. If investments are made at the levels needed, it might still be a few years before their full benefits make their way towards AI firms.

All this hullabaloo around AI has investors on edge, with ghosts of previous bubbles haunting their memories. Although comparisons to the past are the surest way of finding your footing in unfamiliar territory, data shows that this may not be the wisest strategy considering present market dynamics. For example, at the height of the dotcom bubble just before the turn of the millennium, some software firms were trading at 132x their earnings. The five-year average for this value in 1999 was only 37x. In contrast, in 2023, even the biggest AI stocks were trading at P/E multiples of around 39x. The five-year average for this last year was 40x, showcasing why AI valuations may not be overextended.

Indeed, AI firms can target multi-trillion dollar valuations, in line with some of the biggest software and internet firms on the market presently. That is the revolutionary power of AI technology. Over the past decade, tech giants have achieved a scale that few other businesses have before them. By combining billions in users, hundreds of billions in revenue, and tens of billions in net income, these handful of firms have reached 80% of the valuation of the Fortune 500. They are category leaders in fields such as smartphones, ecommerce, cloud, and software as a service (SaaS) - all of which AI promises to disrupt - and ahead of competitors in research and development spending. This is why many of these firms are aggressively incorporating AI into their business models, in hopes of holding onto their thrones.

Some investors remain concerned about AI firms bullying software companies on the market in the near and long term. A cursory glance at the Price-to-Sale (PS) ratios for software stocks in the past decade reveals that after topping out in 2021, the valuations for SaaS firms are near their all time lows. Some of this pessimism around software can also be attributed to slower earnings growth. Coatue research shows that over the next twelve months, only 1% of SaaS stocks expect 30% earnings growth, down from 30% at the peak of the Saas craze. As the future of human-machine interaction moves towards communication in natural language, software firms who adapt to AI changes are more likely to survive than those that do not.

As the markets become decoupled from rate hikes, inflation figures go down, and the prospects of a soft landing become brighter, the macro outlook for AI looks favorable as well. The main driver for future S&P 500 growth in terms of earnings remains AI. According to Coatue research, in the next three years, AI-linked stocks will grow at a compound annual rate of almost 20%, beating their non-AI counterparts by nearly 14 percentage points. 40% of the earnings from tech will be accelerated by AI tailwinds in the period. All indicators point towards a brighter future for AI investors in the long term.

Our Methodology

For this article, we selected AI infrastructure stocks with more than 25% gains in 2024 that are also popular among hedge funds. These are the best AI stocks to buy according to the market participants and hedge funds. 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).

 

 

 

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 115

YTD Return as of August 1: 62%     

Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) makes and sells memory and storage products. These memory and storage products, like DRAM and NAND, form the base of AI data centers through which AI software firms market products like real-time natural language processing, personal assistants, and AI artwork, among others. One of the premier memory products of the firm is high-bandwidth memory (HBM) solutions. In the latest earnings call, the company revealed that the HBM production was sold out for 2024 and 2025. Many hyperscalers rely on Micron memory products, including tech giant Apple that is emerging as a major AI software firm.

Sanjay Mehrotra, the CEO of Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU), said during the third quarter earnings call that despite near-steady demands for memory in PCs and smartphones over the past few months, the firm expected the price of the products it sold to jump in the next few months, primarily because robust AI-driven demand for data center products was causing tightness on leading-edge nodes.

Overall MU ranks 12th on our list of the most important AI stocks to buy. While we acknowledge the potential of MU as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some 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 MU but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.