Evercore ISI Reiterates Outperform on Apple (AAPL), Targets $250

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 Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) 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).

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 166

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a technology company known for its consumer electronics, particularly the iPhones and MacBooks. On May 19, Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani reiterated an “Outperform” rating and a $250.00 price target on the stock. Highlighting Apple’s Services business as a key factor in the company’s valuation and growth, the segment remains central to Apple’s business despite the legal and technological challenges that it has been facing. The analyst noted how, despite regulatory issues impacting the App Store and potential changes to the default search engine payment from Google, the company maintains a strong financial position. Moreover, the potential for artificial intelligence to be overstated could allow the company to take advantage of AI search and help grow its Services business.

Overall, AAPL ranks 5th on our list of AI stocks on Wall Street’s radar. While we acknowledge the potential of AAPL 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 AAPL 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.