The World’s Best Artificial Intelligence Stock Is Still Dirt Cheap
The age of artificial intelligence is upon us. AI and machine learning have the potential to create $3.9 trillion in business value by 2022, according to research firm Gartner (NYSE:IT). Consulting firm McKinsey says that 82% of the businesses it surveyed are generating positive returns from their AI investments, including better customer satisfaction and productivity, better fraud detection at financial firms, and a host of other benefits. In dollar terms, spending on AI and cognitive systems will more than triple between 2018 and 2022, from $24 billion to $77.6 billion, for a compound annual growth rate of 37.3%, according to estimates from research firm IDC.
There are a lot of tech companies aiming to win pieces of this pie. These include cloud computing companies that own the vast data centers where information is stored and processed, the chipmakers producing the CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs that can process the vast amounts of data involved, software companies that organize this data and produce AI programs, and IT consultancies that aid big businesses in implementing these systems.
The “picks and shovels” of AI
The heart of AI, though, rests in the basic components of memory and storage. According to hard disk maker Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX), 23 exabytes of data were produced in 2002 (To put that in a more familiar scale, that’s 23 billion gigabytes.) In 2020, 23 exabytes of data will be produced every five hours. That’s an immense amount of data that will need to be stored, either on hard disk drives or solid-state drives using NAND flash, and then fed to processors via dynamic random access memory (DRAM).
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