Morgan Stanley Names Amazon, Nvidia, and Western Digital as Top Conviction Picks After TMT Conference
Following a week of AI-dominated presentations from hundreds of company executives, the bank's analysts said nearly every business is now defining itself as either an AI enabler or AI adopter.
Morgan Stanley analysts emerged from their annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in San Francisco with strengthened conviction in a select group of technology stocks, led by Amazon, Nvidia, and Western Digital, each of which the bank projects has more than 40 percent upside relative to its 12-month price target. The selections reflect the investment bank's view that AI is no longer a peripheral discussion point at corporate strategy sessions but has become the defining frame for every major business decision.
According to a research note distributed to clients after the conference, nearly every company presenting described its strategy in terms of AI enablement or AI adoption, with discussions 'advancing significantly' from previous years. Where prior TMT conferences featured companies testing AI at the margins of operations, this year's presentations featured executives describing AI integration across entire business divisions.
Salesforce, for example, introduced a new internal productivity metric called 'Agentic Work Units' to capture the value AI agents are now delivering in workflows that previously required human labor.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's remarks at the conference reinforced the bull case for the chipmaker. Huang stated that demand for computing power is 'higher than incredibly high,' with Amazon Web Services 'ramping like mad' and major AI laboratories indicating they need several million net new GPUs in the near term.
Analyst Joseph Moore at Morgan Stanley maintained a strong conviction buy on Nvidia, noting that demand for the Blackwell product line remains robust and that the forthcoming Vera Rubin architecture is expected to sustain the company's leadership in AI compute performance.
For Amazon, analyst Brian Nowak set a $300 price target, reflecting confidence in AWS's role as the dominant cloud infrastructure provider for AI workloads and the company's expanding position in agentic AI tooling. Western Digital's inclusion as a top pick reflects a view that memory constraints will become an increasingly urgent bottleneck as AI models and agentic systems require vastly more high-bandwidth storage than current deployments demand.
The conference also flagged a divergence between AI leaders and laggards that is becoming visible in stock performance. Companies with clear AI strategies and infrastructure relationships are seeing premiums, while those unable to articulate an AI-driven value proposition face mounting investor skepticism.
Read the original reporting at CNBC.
