How to buy AI data track? O'Brien: Nutanix and Pure Storage can take positions, Rubrik was discouraged by high prices.

Oak Harbor initiated coverage of Nutanix, Pure Storage, and Rubrik on Monday. Nutanix Oak Harbor initiated coverage of Nutanix, a provider of enterprise cloud platforms, with an "outperform" rating and a target price of $90. The analyst stated: "Our bullish view is based on three core judgments: firstly, as the industry trend of accelerating towards hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) continues, Nutanix will directly benefit. As a pioneer and major player in this field, Nutanix holds a core competitive position in the industry transformation." Secondly, with customer resistance to VMware due to continuous price increases, Nutanix is expected to gradually gain market share as a substitute. Thirdly, the company has the core capabilities to build and deliver AI applications, which provides strong support for its business expansion in the age of artificial intelligence. The analyst expressed confidence in the company's long-term prospects in the virtualization/AI inference field, despite the recent slowdown in US federal government business and an expansion timeline for independent virtualization business longer than expected. "In addition, we believe that as Nutanix continues to exceed industry '40% rule' standards, its valuation multiple is likely to be reassessed," the analyst said. The '40% rule' refers to the principle that the sum of software company revenue growth rate and profit margin should reach or exceed 40%. Pure Storage Oak Harbor initiated coverage of Pure Storage, a leader in the all-flash array (AFA) market, with an "outperform" rating and a target price of $120. The analyst stated that their bullish view is based on Pure Storage benefiting from the growth in AI application non-structured data creation and storage demands, achieving long-term market share improvement in the all-flash array market with technological advantages, continuing to grab market share from traditional disk storage (HDD) and other flash vendors, and expanding customer base to large-scale data centers. "We believe these factors will drive strong new customer growth, ongoing capacity expansion for existing customers, and continuous improvement in operating profit margin," the analyst said. Rubrik Oak Harbor gave Rubrik a "market perform" rating, stating that the company's valuation already reflects its growth prospects. The analyst believes that Rubrik will benefit from the increasing importance of data driving the expansion of the backup storage total addressable market (TAM), increasing data security vulnerabilities and ransomware attacks that align with the company's security-first strategy, and the industry's shift towards "as a service" platforms. "Although we agree with the market consensus on Rubrik's product differentiation, market opportunities, and strong management, our neutral view is due to increasing competition in the network resiliency field, and we believe that its valuation (approximately 9.5 times EV/CY26E revenue) is at a reasonable level based on the current growth trajectory," the analyst added.