US Tech in 5: The Only Morning Briefing You Need

an analyst at seeking alpha just slapped a $1,200 price target on advanced microdevices now before you run off to your trading app let's be clear this is one analyst's opinion but it's the reasoning behind it that you need to hear yesterday we talked about the real movers in us innovation and today it seems the analysts are scrambling to put a price on that innovation and they're looking in some surprising places the whole world is obsessed with one thing ai chips and in that arena nvidia is the undisputed heavyweight champion everyone knows it amd has been seen as the scrappy contender always trailing but the analysis from stone fox capital points to something different something the market might be missing this isn't just about the flashy ai gpu race anymore this is about the server cpu market think about it every ai model every cloud application every single thing you do online runs on a server somewhere and those servers need brains they need central processing units cpus and according to this new take amd is

now leading in the high end premium server cpu space that's huge while everyone is watching the right hand the ai gpus amd's left hook in the server market just connected this suggests a two front war nvidia might be winning the marquee battle for ai training but amd is quietly capturing the foundational infrastructure that everything else is built on it's a classic strategy while your rival builds the penthouse you buy the entire block the building sits on but the hardware is only half the story the other place analysts are digging for growth is in the software that protects all this new infrastructure and that brings us to zscaler another analyst this time from alpha mantra just laid out a case that zscaler is about to enter a growth acceleration phase now that's a phrase that gets wall street's attention here's the critical shift for years cybersecurity software was sold per seat you have a thousand employees you buy a thousand licenses simple but that model is breaking down why because of ai and automation your biggest

security risks might not be your employees anymore they might be the automated systems the ai agents the data flows between clouds zscaler is pivoting hard to a usage based model the new report highlights that their nonseat ai driven offerings now make up 30% of new contract value and get this their metered recurring revenue is growing over 100% year over year that means their income is increasingly tied not to how many people a company employs but to how much data they're actually using and protecting it's a bet that as enterprise ai adoption explodes the amount of data needing security will explode right along with it they're not selling seats on the bus anymore they're installing a meter on the engine of course not every corner of the tech world is getting a glowing report card to keep things in perspective a different analyst at m and m capital just looked at verisign and basically said pump the brakes verisign has a monopoly on the com and net domain registries sounds like a license to print money

right but the stock is valued at 33 times its trailing earnings and this analyst thinks that's just too expensive even for a monopoly it's a crucial reminder that even in a tech boom valuation still matters as we wade through the noise the real story isn't just one big thing it's a collection of strategic shifts happening just beneath the surface it's amd flanking nvidia in the data center it's zscaler changing the entire business model for cybersecurity and it's the constant nagging question of whether the price tag on any of it is actually justified the most impactful moves aren't always the loudest sometimes they're the ones happening in the foundation and just a final thought here remember

these are analysts' opinions and this is for informational purposes only we're not giving financial advice you should always do your own research before making any investment decisions