The Zacks Analyst Blog Highlights Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Salesforce

Zacks Equity Research

24 May 2024 at 9:42 am·5-min read

For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – May 24, 2024 – Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Amazon AMZN, Microsoft MSFT, Alphabet GOOGL and Salesforce CRM.

Here are highlights from Thursday’s Analyst Blog:

Amazon (AMZN) Boosts AWS Clientele with NinjaTech AI Deal

Amazon continues to ride on its robust cloud computing arm — Amazon Web Services ("AWS"). The solid customer momentum of AWS is driving the company's top line. Shares of Amazon have rallied 20.4% year to date, outperforming the S&P 500 index's growth of 12.7%.

The latest partnership of a generative AI company called NinjaTech AI with AWS is a testament to the above-mentioned fact.

The former launched the next-generation AI agent called Ninja, which has been trained using AWS's machine learning (ML) chips Trainium and Inferentia2 in order to make them powerful and useful.

Apart from these next-generation chips, NinjaTech AI is leveraging Amazon SageMaker in a bid to make training of the underlined AI agents fast, flexible and affordable.

With the help of AWS cloud solutions, Ninja is capable of saving time and money by implementing generative AI in everyday workflows.

AWS's Portfolio Strength: A Key Catalyst

NinjaTech AI's latest move highlights the efficiency and reliability of AWS's innovative cloud products and services. Moreover, it has added strength to AWS's customer base.

Both Trainium and Inferentia2 chips are designed to support the larger 70B variants of the latest popular open-source models like Llama 3. While Trainium chips help train Large Language Models at low costs by powering high-performance compute clusters on AWS, Inferentia2 chips enable models to generate inferences faster and at much lower costs.

In addition to these chips, AWS recently introduced Amazon Bedrock innovations in order to bolster generative AI strength. These innovations include the latest custom model import capability and model evaluation capabilities, and Guardrails, which are designed to deliver easy, fast and secure ways to develop advanced generative AI applications and experiences.

AWS also made its generative AI-powered assistant called Amazon Q generally available.

AWS's growing efforts toward strengthening its portfolio offerings are likely to continue driving customer momentum. This, in turn, will continue to drive AWS's top-line growth in the near term and the long run.

In first-quarter 2024, AWS sales (18% of the total sales) rose 17% year over year to $25.04 billion.

Strengthening the AWS segment, in turn, will boost Amazon's overall financial performance.

For second-quarter 2024, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for sales is pegged at $148.54 billion, indicating year-over-year growth of 10.5%.

The same for earnings per share stands at $1.02, which indicates a year-over-year rise of 61.9%.

Rising Competition

Amazon's solidifying prospects in the promising cloud computing market are expected to continue providing a competitive advantage over its peers like Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, which are also gaining steam.

Microsoft is continuously riding on strong momentum across its Intelligent Cloud business, driven by the solid adoption of Azure. Strength in Azure AI remains a positive. The company's strong efforts to power its cloud capabilities with generative AI are noteworthy. Also, growth in AI Copilot is contributing well to Microsoft's cloud business.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud, which has turned out to be the key catalyst for Alphabet's growth, is gaining from the growing generative AI capabilities, increasing data centers, availability zones and cloud regions. The solid adoption of the Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace remains a major positive.

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

Currently, Amazon carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

A better-ranked stock in the broader technology sector is Salesforce, which carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Shares of Salesforce have gained 8.3% in the year-to-date period. The long-term earnings growth rate for CRM is 17.45%.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.

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For Immediate Release

Amazon (AMZN) Boosts AWS Clientele with NinjaTech AI Deal

AWS's Portfolio Strength: A Key Catalyst

Rising Competition

Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider

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