Microsoft Leads AI Infrastructure Picks as Business Investment Demand Surges
Recent data on US non-defense capital goods orders has shown a beat on expectations, indicating continued business investment demand in AI-related sectors. This trend suggests that real money is flowing into the infrastructure behind tools like ChatGPT.
Retail investors looking at the AI Stocks screener are essentially fishing where capital is already being deployed. Three stocks from the screener have caught attention: Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), and Alphabet (GOOGL).
Microsoft, with a market cap of US$3.68 trillion, is a global technology company providing cloud computing, productivity software, developer tools, and devices. It embeds large language models into products like Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing customers to run AI workloads at scale.
Oracle provides direct exposure to the AI infrastructure build through its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AI services, while still being anchored by long-established database and application businesses. A key feature is that large AI workloads, including LLMs hosted on OCI and AI features embedded into Fusion and NetSuite, sit on top of long contracts and a sizeable reported backlog.
Alphabet, with a market cap of US$4.22 trillion, offers a mix of cash-rich Google Search and YouTube with an AI and cloud business built around Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Gemini, and in-house TPUs. Cloud is tied directly to enterprise AI rollouts, backed by a reported backlog above US$500 billion.