The AI selloff has opened a wide gap between share prices and Wall Street’s expectations. Some of the stocks below have lost nearly half their value in 30 days, while their average analyst targets still imply gains well above 50%. It sounds like an opportunity but can also mean the market has moved faster than the research notes.
The selloff has punished AI capacity builders and hardware suppliers particularly hard. Between September 23 and October 23, Cerebras lost 46.0%, CoreWeave fell 37.6% and Nebius dropped 30.0%. Seagate and Coherent each lost more than 30%. These businesses face different pressures: neoclouds must finance construction, optical suppliers depend on customer deployments, and storage manufacturers face the possibility that new competing capacity will weaken pricing. Rising demand alone cannot protect their shares.
On October 14, Gartner warned that more than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could face impairment by 2030 if providers maintain their investment pace. A data center can fill up and still earn too little to justify its construction cost. Interest accrues before rent arrives, and delays extend that gap. CoreWeave has floating-rate debt that exposes it to higher interest expense; IREN faces financing risk on future expansion even where existing borrowing is fixed or hedged. See how those differences affect the cash left for shareholders here.
Financing can also change what shareholders own. Raising equity may keep a project on schedule while spreading its eventual profits across more shares. Borrowing preserves ownership initially but gives lenders a prior claim on cash. A company can therefore deliver its promised revenue growth without delivering the return implied by an old price target.
Semiconductor investors face another problem: AI spending can keep growing while customers shift orders between competing chip designs. That makes an industry growth forecast a poor substitute for a company-specific earnings forecast. A chip designer must defend its share and pricing; a foundry may retain the manufacturing work when customers switch designs, but still suffers if overall orders slow. See how Nvidia and TSMC divide those risks here.
Investors should not assume analysts have identified the bottom. A target set 20% above a stock’s former price can suddenly imply 100% upside after the shares fall 40%, even without any improvement in the business. Analysts can update late, and further cuts over the coming weeks could erase much of the apparent opportunity. Some cuts have already arrived: UBS lowered its CoreWeave target from $120 to $105 on October 23.
That is why we pair targets with short interest and hedge fund ownership. Heavy short interest can expose disagreement, although convertible-debt and transaction hedges can inflate it. Quarterly holdings cannot identify who bought this month’s dip. Coatue’s Intel and Cerebras positions show why institutional backing also needs context. Neither measure guarantees a recovery. Here, oversold means sharply sold down, not necessarily below a technical RSI threshold.
We revisited a 50-stock selloff shortlist drawn from a review of 124 U.S.-listed companies across the AI ecosystem. The shortlist used split-adjusted closing-price changes from September 23 through October 23, 2026, and required sufficient price history and at least three identifiable analyst targets in the consensus dataset. Its stocks had declined at least 12.41% over that window.
For this large-company list, we required a market capitalization of at least $20 billion and direct commercial exposure to AI computing infrastructure: chips, cloud capacity, networking, data-center equipment, memory or storage. Consumer internet and advertising platforms were excluded. These restrictions left 27 companies from the original selloff shortlist. The group includes focused infrastructure suppliers and diversified companies with substantial infrastructure businesses; it is not a pure-play-only screen.
We ranked those 27 companies by upside to their average 12-month S&P Global analyst price target displayed by Stock Analysis. Upside equals the target divided by the October 23 closing price, minus one. Missing, insufficient or unreconciled target coverage was excluded. The five highest-upside stocks from the ten-stock ranking appear below, counting down to number one; alphabetical ticker order breaks ties. Market capitalizations and targets use the October 23 snapshot.
Short interest uses the September 30 settlement-date snapshot and is expressed as a percentage of estimated float, except for Cerebras, where conflicting float estimates make the number of shares sold short more reliable. Hedge fund counts come from Insider Monkey’s Q2 2026 database and are compared with Q1 where meaningful. These positioning measures provide context and do not determine the ranking. Float estimates vary by provider and can lag share issuance. All prices and targets are in dollars.
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. Insider Monkey’s quarterly newsletter strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and returned 599.2% from May 2014 through June 2, 2026, beating its benchmark by 372 percentage points (see more details here).
#5. Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd (NASDAQ:CRDO)
Analyst Upside: 89.48%
30-Day Decline: 24.03%
Short Interest: 6.60% of Float
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 86
Credo makes the connections that move data between expensive AI processors. Its active electrical cables and optical connectivity products address a practical problem — adding computing power isn’t quite as useful when network links cannot keep up. Fiscal first-quarter revenue grew 114.7% to $479 million, and management forecast $525 million to $535 million for the following quarter. Bulls expect faster, more power-efficient links to gain importance as clusters expand.
The shares lost 24.0% over the month as AI hardware valuations came under pressure. Credo had already sold off after its September 1 results, before this screening window. GAAP operating income fell 22.6% sequentially to $120.7 million as GAAP gross margin slipped from 68.2% to 64.5% and operating expenses increased. Midpoint guidance implied a recovery to roughly $137 million of GAAP operating income, up 13.6%, with adjusted gross margin holding around 68%. Bulls therefore need the forecast recovery to materialize after the reported earnings deterioration.
Q2 hedge fund holders rose to 86 from 59, although Point72 reduced its share count by 17.7% to 6.15 million. It still held $1.67 billion at June-end, so the reduction was substantial. Shares sold short then jumped 31.0% between September settlement dates, reaching 6.60% of float. Neither the major-holder trim nor the growing short position fits an uncomplicated bullish reading of the higher fund count.
Western Digital’s October 22 results make its 27.4% monthly decline especially striking. Revenue rose 55% to $4.38 billion, and management guided to $5.1 billion next quarter with a 60.5% adjusted gross margin at the midpoint. Bulls are betting that AI-generated data keeps expanding demand for bulk storage, allowing higher shipments and improved pricing to reinforce each other.
The concern, however, is how long those conditions can last. Reports of Toshiba’s planned hard-drive expansion hit the sector in early October. New competing supply could give cloud customers more bargaining power just as suppliers enjoy incredibly strong margins. Financing pressures on the AI buildout add another risk to customer orders. That makes the price paid for current profits important: our Western Digital–Micron comparison tests how weaker cash generation changes the valuation of each stock.
The latest quarter generated $1.38 billion of free cash flow, giving Western Digital cash to fund investment and shareholder returns. Hedge fund holders increased to 98 from 83 in Q2 in Insider Monkey database, although AQR reduced its stake by 518,617 shares, or 15.0%, to 2.94 million. Its remaining position was worth $1.88 billion at June-end, that’s pretty significant despite the reduction. September 30 short interest was 4.90% of float. However, both snapshots are from before the Toshiba reports. Analyst caution is more recent, with TD Cowen cutting its target from $540 to $430 on October 23, despite the strong results. Its revised target sits far below the $668.50 consensus.
Coherent lost 7.9% on October 12 alone as optical stocks sold off following concerns about funding the AI buildout. Its full-month decline reached 30.4%. That financing issue reaches Coherent through its customers. Optical components generate revenue when networks are built, so deferred data-center projects can delay orders even when computing demand remains strong.
Whale Rock increased its Coherent stake by 25.3% to 1.22 million shares in Q2, even as the overall hedge fund count fell to 105 from 114. Its $482.1 million position represented 3.87% of its reported 13F portfolio at June-end. The falling count therefore masks substantial buying by an existing holder. September 30 short interest was 5.66% of float. Susquehanna then lowered its target from $425 to $350 on October 21. That puts its revised target well below the $410.43 consensus.
Bulls see a product transition that can outlast the spending scare. Moving more data between AI processors increases demand for optical links, and Coherent supplies the photonic components and systems behind those connections. Fiscal fourth-quarter revenue rose 34% to $2.05 billion, while GAAP gross margin improved 2.77 percentage points to 38.5%. Expanding production while preserving that margin gain would turn rising demand into stronger earnings.
CoreWeave’s 37.6% slide points to the market’s growing worries over the cost of financing AI capacity. Second-quarter net interest expense reached $640 million, against $2.575 billion of revenue. Floating-rate borrowing leaves earnings exposed when rates rise, even if demand for computing remains strong. The distinction is existing debt versus future funding: our CoreWeave–IREN comparison traces how higher rates reach today’s interest bill and tomorrow’s expansion costs.
On the other hand, hedge fund ownership rose to 71 holders from 63 in Q2. September 30 short interest reached 17.24% of float. Shares sold short increased 9.1% from mid-September. So there’s both interest and skepticism among hedge funds, although gross short positions can include hedges. The $140.58 consensus target implies 159.18% upside from $54.24; UBS nevertheless cut its target from $120 to $105 on October 23.
Bulls have operating growth to point to, as quarterly revenue more than doubled, and June-end revenue backlog reached about $104 billion. That backlog excludes over $25 billion of commitments added early in Q3, but remains subject to delivery and service-availability requirements. CoreWeave must turn contracted demand into operating cash while funding new capacity and servicing debt.
Cerebras lost 46.0% over the 30-day window as investors questioned how much OpenAI’s inference demand would flow through its hardware. Reports that a newer OpenAI ultrafast offering was running on Nvidia GPUs challenged expectations for Cerebras’ role. However, competition and the need to fund capacity ahead of revenue remain the more durable risks.
Stock Analysis displayed a $291.64 average price target, implying 163.2% upside from $110.82, but dated the consensus update October 5. TD Cowen subsequently cut its target from $275 to $175 on October 19 while maintaining Buy. That lower target implies 57.9% upside. The revisions narrowed the apparent opportunity. Insider Monkey counted 78 hedge fund holders in Q2 for the stock. September 30 short interest totaled 14.12 million shares, up 10.3% from September 15. Coatue reported 7.01 million Cerebras shares worth $1.55 billion at June-end, or 3.19% of its reported 13F portfolio, alongside a new Intel holding. Its Cerebras beneficial ownership included 6.67 million Class B shares convertible into Class A. Our review of those positions examines the case for alternatives to Nvidia and the operating hurdles each company still faces.
Bulls can point to a growing cloud business because in the second-quarter, CBRS’s cloud and services revenue reached $126 million, up 281%, while remaining performance obligations totaled $25.4 billion. Consolidated GAAP gross margin was 14%, versus 41% on the company’s adjusted core basis, which excludes warrant amortization, stock compensation and other items. Even on that basis, operating margin remained negative 16%, so rapid growth has yet to produce operating profitability.
While we acknowledge the risk and potential of CBRS as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CBRS and that has 10,000% upside potential, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.
