We recently published a list of 11 AI Stocks On Wall Street’s Radar. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ:AUR) stands against other AI stocks on Wall Street’s radar.
US President Donald Trump is all set to revive the country’s struggling coal industry. Last month, he signed a series of executive orders so that the government could meet the surging energy demand of AI data centers. Executive Order 14241 will allow several older coal-fired plants about to retire to continue generating power for the foreseeable future. This will be done to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence.
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Repeatedly promoting coal as a power source for data centers, Trump told the World Economic Forum in January that he would be approving power plants for AI through an emergency declaration. He also called on tech companies to use coal as a backup power source.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal.”
However, with the tech industry investing billions of dollars to expand renewable energy and leveraging nuclear power as a way to meet its growing electricity demand, the use of coal is actually against the tech companies’ environmental goals.
Nevertheless, the tech industry does acknowledge that fossil fuel generation will eventually be needed to help navigate the electricity demand from AI. However, these companies are focusing on natural gas as it emits less half the CO2 of coal per kilowatt hour of power.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time. We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term.”
-Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers.
Other companies, such as Anthropic, have stated that there are a broader set of options available than just coal. “
We would certainly consider it but I don’t know if I’d say it’s at the top of our list.”
-Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark
For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds. The hedge fund data is as of Q4 2024.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
A closeup of a self-driving hardware unit inside the dashboard of a passenger vehicle.
Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ:AUR)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 22
Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ:AUR) is a self-driving technology company. On Monday, May 19, Cantor Fitzgerald maintained a positive outlook on the stock with an “Overweight” rating and a $12.00 price target. The company has recently achieved a significant milestone by launching its commercial self-driving service, Aurora Driver, in Texas. This milestone not only aligns with the management’s projected timeline but also places the company as the first to introduce self-driving trucks in the United States.
Aurora will also be deemed a pioneer in operating a commercial autonomous driving service with heavy-duty trucks on public roads in the country. The company has announced plans to extend its driverless services by the end of the year. Its Autonomy Performance Indicator (API), a metric used to track the performance and readiness of autonomous vehicle systems, has reached 95% in the first quarter of 2025. This figure exceeds Aurora’s commercialization goal of 90%, a win for the company, which underscores its advancement in delivering reliable self-driving technology.
Overall, AUR ranks 11th on our list of AI stocks on Wall Street’s radar. While we acknowledge the potential of AUR as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AUR and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.