Analysts favor AI infrastructure names

Wall Street analysts spent the past week upgrading companies that sell the hardware and software behind artificial intelligence systems, not just the chatbots people see. (finance.yahoo.com) On April 9, Stifel upgraded Texas Instruments to Buy from Hold and raised its price target to $250 from $215. The firm said the chipmaker is nearing the end of a six-year stretch of elevated factory spending and is positioned for stronger free cash flow as that burden eases. (finance.yahoo.com) (sec.gov) That same day, Guggenheim upgraded Datadog to Buy from Neutral with a $175 target. The call pointed to rising demand for tools that watch cloud systems and security traffic as artificial intelligence workloads create more data and more complexity. (marketbeat.com) (gurufocus.com) Sandisk did not get a rating upgrade in the same roundup, but analysts still pushed targets higher. Cantor Fitzgerald raised its target to $1,000 from $800 on April 9 and kept an Overweight rating after Sandisk reported quarterly revenue of $3.025 billion, up 61% from a year earlier. (gurufocus.com) (sandisk.com) The common thread is “picks and shovels” for artificial intelligence: analog chips that manage power, cloud software that monitors systems, and memory that stores the data those systems consume. Investors have been rewarding those suppliers because every new artificial intelligence model needs electricity, servers, networking, and storage before it reaches an end user. (finance.yahoo.com) (sandisk.com) Texas Instruments fits that theme even though it is not a headline artificial intelligence stock. The company said in its 2025 annual report that it had allocated about $24 billion to capital expenditures during its recent buildout and was near completion of that elevated spending cycle. (sec.gov) Datadog’s role is different: it sells observability software, which is the dashboard and alarm system for modern computing infrastructure. On March 23, the company said its Bits AI Security Analyst was available to customers everywhere and could cut some threat investigations from hours to as little as 30 seconds. (markets.financialcontent.com) Sandisk is tied to the same buildout through memory chips. In its January 29 results, the company said datacenter revenue rose 64% from the prior quarter, driven by adoption among artificial intelligence infrastructure builders and customers deploying artificial intelligence at scale. (sandisk.com) The bullish calls do not erase the risks. Texas Instruments still depends on an analog chip recovery, Datadog still trades on growth expectations, and Sandisk is exposed to the boom-and-bust pricing of NAND flash memory. (finance.yahoo.com) (gurufocus.com) (marketbeat.com) For now, the analyst moves show where the market is looking for artificial intelligence exposure in April 2026: less at the apps people type into, and more at the companies supplying the pipes, power, and storage underneath. (finance.yahoo.com)