We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks on Analysts’ Radar As AI Spending Grows. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR) stands against other AI stocks on analysts’ radar as AI spending grows.

Money is pouring into artificial intelligence at unprecedented levels, alleviating initial concerns. Soaring investments from big tech companies, national governments, and venture capitalists come amid a technological shift from conventional large language models toward reasoning models and AI agents.

The shift follows the DeepSeek breakthrough that showed it’s possible to reduce the amount of resources needed to run large language models. While DeepSeek did cause panic by showing it could develop an AI model at a fraction of the costs of other models, the same has not stopped capital inflows into AI infrastructure.

That’s evident in the $500 billion Stargate project that promises to enhance US data center capacity. Joining the Fray is Chinese Internet giant Alibaba, which plans to invest $52 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure, an amount that is much more than what the company has spent over the past decade.  Major hyperscalers plan to spend $215 billion in capital expenditures collectively in 2025 on AI data centers, affirming that the AI investment spree is alive and growing.

“I think it’s entirely possible that frontier labs need to keep pumping in staggering amounts of money in order to push the frontier forward,” says Chris Taylor, CEO of Fractional AI, a San Francisco-based startup.

Investors of all stripes, from corporates to venture capitalists, are going crazy over the widespread belief that artificial intelligence is the next big thing in technology. According to preliminary PitchBook data for the fourth quarter of 2024, AI-focused companies accounted for 50.8% of global venture capital funding in value terms, nearly doubling the share from the same quarter in 2023.

According to Bill Janeway, a venture capitalist and economist, the VC industry’s herd mentality is reflected in the concentration of investment in AI.

“This is what we see again and again, whenever any of these new technological innovations have a broad range of potential applications. But nobody knows yet [which] will prove to be sustainable on a longer basis,” Janeway said.

The investment spree comes as businesses increasingly use AI models as they learn more about their capabilities. This is causing the demand for processing power to change from training models to using them, or what the AI industry refers to as inference.

According to Tuhin Srivastava, CEO of Baseten, a company that offers AI computing resources to other businesses, this trend toward inference is already well underway. His clients include tech firms that use AI in their services and apps,

By developing ever-more-capable AI models, large AI labs at companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta continue competing against each other. According to Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, the goal is to take as much of the still-developing AI market share as possible at any cost. Therefore, demand for AI models could increase by a factor of a trillion or more on the development of AI-specific microchips that deliver efficient systems.

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 in 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).

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 56

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NYSE:JNPR) is a communication equipment company that develops and sells a range of networking products, including routers and network management software. It also integrates AI into its networking infrastructure to enable automated network management. The company announced on February 24 that it has started leveraging Mist AI technology to enhance its routing technology.

The integration of Mist AI technology should allow Juniper Networks to accord its customers improved WAN routing performance and automation. By offering thorough visibility and control over routing, identifying problems, and recommending preventative measures, Juniper Networks, Inc.’s (NYSE:JNPR) routing solutions seek to reduce operating costs by up to 85% in certain situations. In addition to adding AI-native routing observability, proactive troubleshooting capabilities, and intent-based network optimization to its Paragon portfolio, the company unveiled the new ACX7020 Access Edge Router.

Overall, JNPR ranks 3rd on our list of AI stocks on analysts’ radar as AI spending grows. While we acknowledge the potential of JNPR as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than JNPR but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and Complete List of 59 AI Companies Under $2 Billion in Market Cap

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.