A Nvidia HGX H100 server at the Yotta Data Services Pvt. data center in Navi Mumbai, India, on Thursday, Mar. 14, 2024.<\/p>\n
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/p>\n
Notable technology industry analyst Dan Ives says Big Tech companies and private equity firms are gearing up to make a flurry of acquisitions to stay ahead in the AI arms race. The analyst shared his picks for stocks that are prime acquisition targets as the dealmaking boom gets underway. <\/p>\n
“With the regulatory landscape becoming more lenient to acquisitions with the new administrations stepping in and no longer representing steep hurdles, we believe that the tech M&A floodgates are ready to be opened as more opportunities arise to add accretive assets with an easier path forward,” Ives said late Wednesday note to Wedbush Securities clients.<\/p>\n
Over the past few months, several technology firms have entered into deals to sell their businesses to AI and AI-adjacent firms. Core Scientific<\/a> agreed in July to sell its data center business to CoreWeave<\/a> in a $9 billion all-stock deal<\/a>. Around the same time, Palo Alto Networks<\/a> announced it would acquire CyberArk<\/a>, an Israeli security firm valued at $25 billion<\/a>, while NiCE<\/a>\u00a0unveiled plans to purchase consumer-focused generative AI company\u00a0Cognigy for nearly $1 billion.<\/p>\n Ives pointed to C3.ai<\/a>\u00a0and Sandisk<\/a> as being among the prime M&A targets, while Apple<\/a> and IBM<\/a> are most likely to be highly acquisitive during this AI merger wave because the two Big Tech companies are looking to play catch up in the AI race. <\/p>\n “While plenty of funding is expected to build AI use cases, we anticipate significant consolidation within the space over the next 5-10 years as more niche use cases for AI will be picked up and added to growing AI product portfolios from large-scale tech players and other financial buyers to capitalize on the exploding demand for AI across both enterprise and federal landscapes,” Ives wrote.<\/p>\n Here are the analyst’s top publicly traded takeover candidates.<\/p>\n Ives stock picks for AI-related M&ATickersCompaniesStock Performance (YTD)TENBTenable Holdings-25.66%QLYSQualys-6.33%AIC3.AI-48.85%LYFTLyft68.33%TRIPTripAdvisor4.47%SNDKSandisk–<\/p>\n Source: Wedbush Securities<\/p>\n Sandisk shares have surged more than 200% since the stock began trading under the ticker SNDK in February. Lyft<\/a> and Tripadvisor<\/a> are up 68% and 5% since the beginning of this year, respectively.<\/p>\n However, Tenable Holdings<\/a> stock fell 26% this year, while C3.ai shares plunged 49% over the same period. Qualys<\/a> shares slid roughly 6% in the year to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Nvidia HGX H100 server at the Yotta Data Services Pvt. data center in Navi Mumbai, India, on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,7175,276,277,161,93362,49,48,89858,15849,49421,7160,1385,34134,93363,41200,93360,92393,3097,61,93361,39517],"class_list":{"0":"post-185766","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-apple-inc","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-business-news","13":"tag-c3-ai-inc","14":"tag-ca","15":"tag-canada","16":"tag-core-scientific-inc","17":"tag-coreweave-inc","18":"tag-cyberark-software-ltd","19":"tag-international-business-machines-corp","20":"tag-investment-strategy","21":"tag-lyft-inc","22":"tag-nice-ltd","23":"tag-palo-alto-networks-inc","24":"tag-qualys-inc","25":"tag-sandisk-corp","26":"tag-stock-markets","27":"tag-technology","28":"tag-tenable-holdings-inc","29":"tag-tripadvisor-inc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}