Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang holds up the company’s artificial intelligence accelerator chip used in data centers when delivering a speech at the Nvidia Japan Artificial Intelligence Summit in Tokyo on November 13, 2024.
Akio Chika | Bloomberg | Getty Images
For many everyday consumers, artificial intelligence remains an abstract concept, unsure of how it will change their lives. But there’s no question whether companies find value in it.
Some of the biggest winners from this year’s stock market rally (the Nasdaq is up 33% and other U.S. stock indexes are up by double digits) are directly related to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. chip manufacturer NVIDIA is one of them, but it’s not alone.
Another prominent theme driving this year’s outperformance is cryptocurrency. Since the launch of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in January, cryptocurrencies have seen a big boost in 2024, with Donald Trump winning the election and the cryptocurrency industry providing significant funding. Many cryptocurrency-related stocks surged.
With four trading days left in the year, here are the five best-performing U.S. tech stocks among companies valued at $5 billion or more in 2024.
Apply love
Adam Foroughi, CEO of AppLovin.
CNBC
Apply love It entered this year with a market capitalization of about $13 billion and is best known for investing in a string of mobile game studios that have made games such as Woody Block Puzzle, Clockmaker and Bingo Story.
By the end of the year, AppLovin’s valuation had soared to $110 billion, making it worth more than Starbucks, Intel and Airbnb. As of Tuesday’s close, AppLovin shares were up 758% this year, far outpacing all other technology companies.
While AppLovin went public in 2021, riding the wave of online gaming in the COVID-19 era, the company is now focused on online advertising and lucrative profits from advances in artificial intelligence.
Last year, AppLovin released an updated version 2.0 of its ad search engine called AXON, which helps deliver more targeted ads on gaming apps it owns and is also used by studios that license the technology. Software platform revenue grew 66% in the third quarter to $835 million, exceeding total growth by 39%.
Net profit soared 300% in the quarter, lifting the company’s profit margin to 36.3% from 12.6% a year ago.
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi net worth Having passed $10 billion, we are even more excited about what is to come. During the company’s November earnings call, Foroughi raved about a test e-commerce project that allows companies to serve targeted ads in games.
“In all my years, this is the best product I’ve ever seen us launch, the fastest growing, but it’s still in the pilot phase,” he said.
micro strategy
Cost Photo | Noor Photo | Getty Images
The company’s shares are up 467% this year on the back of a Bitcoin buying strategy that turned founder Michael Saylor into a cryptocurrency cult hero.
In mid-2020, the company announced plans to start buying Bitcoin. Until now, MicroStrategy has been a middling business intelligence software provider, but since then it has purchased more than 444,000 Bitcoins, using its rising stock price as a way to sell stock, raise debt and buy more tokens .
It is now the world’s fourth-largest holder of Bitcoin, behind founder Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and cryptocurrency exchange Binance, with a stockpile worth nearly $44 billion. MicroStrategy’s market capitalization has soared from about $1.1 billion as a software company to $80 billion today.
Although the rally began before November, Trump’s election victory last month added fuel to the fire. Since then, the stock has gained 57%, while Bitcoin has gained about 44%. Trump has called Bitcoin a “fraud,” but he is the industry’s top choice in this election and has strong support from some major players, including Coin library.
Shortly after the election, Thaler told CNBC: “As the red sweeps and Bitcoin surges, other digital assets will start to surge as well.” He said that Bitcoin is still a “safe transaction” in the crypto space, but as the broader With the “digital asset framework” in place for the crypto market, “the entire digital asset industry will see a surge.”
Palantir
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp travels to Sun Valley, Idaho, to attend the morning session of the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference on July 10, 2024.
David Paul Morris | David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
Palantir In 2024, the company’s stock price increased by 380%, experiencing multiple significant gains. The software company’s best performance last month was when it raised its revenue forecast a day before the presidential election.
The company, which sells data analytics tools to defense agencies, raised its 2024 target and its fourth-quarter guidance topped analysts’ expectations. Palantir’s third-quarter results also ranked among the best, CEO Alex Karp announced in the financial report earnings release”, “We absolutely failed miserably this quarter, driven by continued demand for artificial intelligence.
The stock rose 23% after the earnings report was released, and the day after Trump’s victory, the stock rose another 8.6%. Palantir co-founder and board member Peter Thiel was a big supporter of the 2016 Trump campaign and helped organize a meeting with tech executives at Trump Tower shortly after the election. Karp was one of the attendees.
However, Karp has publicly endorsed Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 race. he told the New York Times In a report published in August, Thiel’s earlier support for Trump and subsequent backlash made it “actually harder to get things done.”
Still, Wall Street remains optimistic about Palantir following the election, believing more military spending will flow to the company.
Karp’s comments in a pre-election earnings report suggested the company would be fine no matter what.
“Our business growth is accelerating and our financial results are exceeding expectations as we meet unwavering demand for the most advanced artificial intelligence technology from U.S. government and commercial customers,” Karp said in a statement. Letter to shareholders.
Analysts expect revenue to grow about 24% in 2025, to $3.5 billion, according to LSEG.
Robin Hood
Robin Hood Although shares fell 17% on Oct. 31 due to disappointing earnings, the company’s shares have more than tripled this year.
A few days later, as all crypto-related stocks rose, investors stopped paying attention to the numbers, with the stock up 20% after Trump was elected. One of Robinhood’s biggest growth engines is cryptocurrency, allowing retail investors to easily buy cryptocurrencies as well as stocks on the app.
Cryptocurrency trading revenue increased 165% year-over-year to $61 million in the third quarter, accounting for 10% of total net revenue.
In addition to Bitcoin, Robinhood users can easily purchase about 20 other cryptocurrencies, ranging from popular digital assets like Ethereum to altcoins like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Bonk. At the company’s investor day in November, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that cryptocurrencies are not just an investment but a “disruptive technology that will transform the underlying infrastructure of payments, lending and various tradable assets.” ”.
Analysts expect Robinhood’s fourth-quarter revenue to grow more than 70% to $805.7 million, which would be the fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2021, the year the company went public, according to LSEG.
Robinhood has outpaced Coinbase this year, which is up 61%. But with a market capitalization of $70 billion, Coinbase is still worth twice that.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA The amazing run continues.
Following a 239% gain last year, Nvidia has soared 183% this year, boosting its market value by $2.2 trillion, driven by generative artificial intelligence.
This year, NVIDIA won the title of the world’s most valuable public company twice. apple has regained the lead, approaching US$4 trillion, of which NVIDIA is US$3.4 trillion. Microsoft $3.3 trillion.
Nvidia remains the biggest beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, as the largest cloud providers and web companies snap up all the graphics processing units they can find. Annual revenue has grown by at least 94% in each of the past six quarters, with growth exceeding 200% three times.
CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in the company’s latest financial report that the next-generation artificial intelligence chip called Blackwell is in “full production.” Finance chief Colette Kress said Blackwell’s fourth-quarter revenue is expected to be in the “billions of dollars.”
“Every customer is racing to be the first to market,” Kress said. “Blackwell is now in the hands of all of our key partners who are working hard to build out their data centers.”
While growth is expected to remain strong for a company of Nvidia’s size, an inevitable slowdown is coming. Analysts expect economic growth to slow down on an annual basis in the coming quarters, with growth falling into the mid-40s by the second half of next year.
Nvidia relies on a handful of tech giants for huge revenues, so any economic fluctuations pose significant risks to investors.
This helps explain why Nvidia likes to tell Wall Street about the plethora of companies that are building new AI services and “is racing to accelerate the development of these applications and potentially deploy billions of agents in the coming years,” says Reis said.
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