These cheap artificial intelligence stocks will make you rich

Investments in 2021 will be quite beneficial if you can get these cheapest stocks of artificial intelligence. Here is a list of the cheapest artificial intelligence stocks.

Nvidia

Leading graphics chip company Nvidia has taken advantage of the AI boom, with its graphics cards becoming the de facto standard in data centers around the world. Machine learning's training phase demands a lot of computing power; the phase that follows, the inference phase, requires less. Graphics processing unit (GPU) chips, used primarily for rendering video games, support both phases well. Nvidia's data center business represents a steadily increasing share of the company's total revenue. This segment isn't all AI-related — Nvidia's graphics cards are used to accelerate a wide variety of data center applications. But AI is one of the driving forces behind the company's growth. Self-driving cars are another area of focus. Nvidia develops platforms, including hardware and software, that can power driver-assistance features, as well as fully autonomous driving. A self-driving car must process massive amounts of data from multiple sensors and cameras in real-time, detect objects such as pedestrians and other vehicles, and make complex decisions. They require a tremendous amount of computing power, and that's exactly what Nvidia's platform delivers. Nvidia's graphics cards could someday be supplanted by more specialized processors designed for AI, but, for now, the company is in an enviable position.

IBM

This legacy tech company is an integrated provider of hardware, software, and services to large enterprise customers. Its mainframe computer systems are still ubiquitous in certain industries, and it regularly signs multi-year technology deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. IBM's strategy with AI is to apply the technology in ways that augment human intelligence, increase efficiency, or lower costs. In the healthcare industry, IBM's AI technology is being used to create individualized care plans, accelerate the process of bringing new drugs to market, and improve the quality of care. In the financial services industry, via the company's 2016 acquisition of promontory financial group, IBM is using AI to help clients with the daunting task of financial regulatory compliance. While the market for AI products and services is fragmented, IBM is leading the industry. Market research firm IDC ranked IBM as the leader in AI software platforms with an 8.8% market share in 2019, or US$303.8 million in revenue, up 26% from the prior year. IBM is a complicated company undergoing transformation, and AI is far from its only growth opportunity. But if you're looking to invest in a company that is well-positioned to benefit from the AI boom, then IBM is a good choice.

Micron Technology

Micron Technology manufactures memory chips, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory found in solid-state storage drives. Most of what the company makes are commodity products, meaning that supply and demand dictate pricing. This leads to sometimes brutal cycles of boom and bust in the semiconductor sector, where an oversupply of chips can significantly push down prices. In 2021, demand for memory chips is strong, boosted by the growth of mobile networks, 5G, cloud computing, and a recovery in the automotive sector, and a shortage in semiconductors has helped lift prices for Micron's DRAM and NAND chips. In the future, demand for memory chips will only grow, and that's especially true in the AI industry. Self-driving cars are a good example. All the sensors and cameras produce a lot of data — around 1 GB per second, according to Micron estimates. Data centers running AI processes need plenty of memory and so do smartphones that may be doing AI work. Newer iPhones, for example, use AI with the camera function to produce improved images. Micron will likely remain volatile due to the nature of its business. Even though AI is driving increased demand for memory chips, in the long run, supply and demand reign supreme in the short term. If you have the stomach for a volatile stock, Micron isn't a bad way to bet on AI.

Amazon

Perhaps no company is using AI more widely than Amazon. Founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has been an evangelist for AI and machine learning, and although Amazon started as an online retailer, technology has always been at the company's core. Today, Amazon uses artificial intelligence for everything from Alexa, its industry-leading voice-activated technology, to its Amazon Go cashier-less grocery stores, to Amazon web services Sagemaker, the cloud infrastructure tool that deploys high-quality machine learning models for data scientists and developers. Amazon's e-commerce business is also built on AI since algorithms run its top-flight recommendation engines for e-commerce and video and music streaming. AI is how Amazon determines product rankings. Even Amazon's logistics operations benefit from its AI prowess, which helps with scheduling, rerouting, and other ways to improve delivery accuracy and efficiency. Drone delivery, which the company has long sought to implement, would be yet another AI application for the tech giant.

C3.ai

C3.ai may be the closest thing on the stock market to a pure-play AI stock, as the "ai" in the company's name and its ticker might indicate. While the companies on the list above are diversified tech giants or chip-makers that have some businesses involved with AI, artificial intelligence is the entire focus of C3.ai. C3.ai is a SaaS company whose software allows companies to deploy large AI applications. The company's tools help its customers accelerate software development and reduce cost and risk, and they have a wide variety of applications. For example, the U.S. Air Force uses C3 AI Readiness to predict aircraft systems failures, identify spare parts, and find new ways to increase mission capability. European utility company Engie (OTC: ENGIY) is using C3 AI to analyze energy consumption and reduce energy expenditures. C3.ai is the first mover in its industry and says it isn't aware of an end-to-end enterprise AI development platform that is directly competitive with it. That unique positioning could make the company a big winner over the long term, although the AI SaaS market is evolving and could attract competition from big cloud infrastructure such as Amazon or Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).