5 AI Stocks in Focus on Wall Street: Tesla, Meta, and More

2. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 312

On April 21, Piper Sandler analyst Billy Fitzsimmons reiterated an Overweight rating on the stock with a $500.00 price target. Firm analysts are optimistic about Microsoft’s AI momentum, particularly led by Copilot and Azure. The stock is second on our list of AI Stocks in Focus on Wall Street.

Piper Sandler highlighted two key investor debates surrounding the stock ever since the last print. These include concerns that there may be a need to make more capacity internally available to support growing AI demand, and that Copilot has lagged behind the native capabilities of frontier model providers at a time when seat-based models are under pressure.

The firm expects that the management may signal higher capital expenditures on the upcoming fiscal third quarter call or through early comments on fiscal 2027 spending. Nevertheless, MSFT remains one of Piper Sandler’s top picks.

Piper Sandler also noted how Copilot has improved year to date, with the multi-model approach serving as a differentiator.

On Azure, MSFT is one of the few companies able to monetize both OpenAI and Anthropic’s growth. CEO Satya Nadella announced on LinkedIn on 4/16 that the Fairwater data center in Wisconsin is going live ahead of schedule. We think the F3Q cc Azure growth bar is ~38.5%, a similar 1 pt beat to F2Q.