Here's an Unexpected Artificial Intelligence Winner You Probably Weren't Thinking About
What is artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence may sound fancy, but it is really just a computer program. That's important to remember because computer programs have to run on computers, which is why Nvidia is such a hot stock. It makes the chips that function as AI's brain. But there's so much more going on here than just chips.
For example, Dominion Energy recently highlighted that in the second half of 2024 it experienced an 88% surge in capacity demand for connections directly related to data centers. That's basically where AI lives. But step back and think about that for one second.
In order for AI to have a home two things need to happen. First, a data center has to be built. And second, electricity infrastructure has to be created to provide power to that data center. Both of those things are products that need steel, which is what Nucor provides. In fact, Nucor has specific divisions that make building components for data centers, and the structures that support electric power lines.
NUE data by YCharts
Why investors should consider Nucor
Nucor's shares are down around 30% from their 52-week highs. The stock is clearly unloved today on Wall Street, given that it is currently in its own personal bear market. That isn't shocking, however, given that steel is a cyclical industry. What's notable about this fact, however, is that this is the time when long-term investors should be most interested in a cyclical stock, not when it is flying high.
A big reason why Nucor is so attractive is that its business model has proven incredibly resilient over time. The best evidence of that is the company's status as a Dividend King, with five decades of annual dividend increases behind it. That requires a strong business model that gets executed well in both good markets and bad.
Nucor actually views bad markets as an opportunity to invest in its business so it comes out the other side of an industry downturn a better company. It can do this because it has a very strong balance sheet, with a modest debt-to-equity ratio of 0.4 times and a debt-to-EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) ratio of only around 2 times. But the big benefit is that when the steel market eventually recovers as it always has before, Nucor produces higher highs and higher lows with regard to its earnings. That is actually a specific company goal.
Now add in the tailwind that is likely to come from AI and this story starts to sound pretty compelling. Nucor is out of favor on Wall Street but is investing to become a better business, with $3 billion in capital investments planned in 2025 and projects that will come online through to 2027. And it is likely to see continued business strength from the needs of one of the hottest sectors on Wall Street, AI and all that goes into supporting that industry.
Don't sleep on Nucor or you could miss your opportunity
Nucor's stock momentum actually turned for the better in April, with the stock now off of its lows. There's still time to jump on this Dividend King steel company, but you'll need to act quickly. Although AI isn't the only thing supporting Nucor's business, it is an important strength right now. When the rest of the company's end markets start to turn for the better, AI could be the super charger that takes the stock to new highs.
Should you invest $1,000 in Nucor right now?
Before you buy stock in Nucor, consider this:
The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nucor wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years.
Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $614,911!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $714,958!*
Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is907% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to163%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor.
See the 10 stocks »
*Stock Advisor returns as of May 5, 2025
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBC
6 minutes ago
- CBC
Chatbots learned to write from us. Can AI now change the way we think?
Social Sharing As AI saturates the internet, researchers say it's changing the way we write — and, potentially, the way we think. A recent report from online security platform Imperva found automated traffic surpassed human-generated activity online for the first time in 2024. While experts told CBC News it's impossible to say definitively whether that's accurate, they do note there's more AI online than ever before. And as people increasingly turn to AI-powered chatbots in their everyday lives, experts suggest they're mimicking the language chatbots tend to use. Some worry this is creating a feedback loop that could shrink human creativity and potentially alter our thought processes. "I do worry about the homogenization of language being the canary in the coal mine for the homogenization of thought, to where AI starts to really influence not just what we say, but how we think," said Canadian futurist Sinead Bovell, who founded the tech education company WAYE that advises organizations on emerging technologies. She says more than half of text online is now likely generated in full or in part by AI. Bovell says she's noticed a uniformity in the way people write on social media platforms like X and LinkedIn, as well as sites like Substack, the blogging and newsletter platform. Several experts told CBC News that this growing homogeneity of language online is also making it increasingly difficult to parse what is and isn't written by humans. Bovell says some of the hallmarks of AI writing include symmetrical clauses such as, "It's not just X, but Y," words like "moreover," the use of lists and bullet points, metaphors that often don't make sense and a generally bland, neutral tone. AI also impacts human thought, reasoning Morteza Dehghani, director of the University of Southern California's Center for Computational Language Sciences, says his research bolsters his concern about the homogenization of language and thought. "We're losing the variance and perspective that we see in human societies. And this is going to affect our reasoning as well," Dehghani said. In a February study, Dehghani and a team of USC researchers analyzed language found in Reddit posts, scientific papers and American community newspapers from 2018 to 2025. They found a spike in AI-generated text in late 2022, which they note corresponded with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot. They also found a drop in the variance and complexity of written text since that spike. Dehghani says this indicates that even writers who aren't directly using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT seem to be trying to adapt to the writing structures they see in an online world increasingly overrun by AI. "You want to write in the same fashion that your readers are exposed to, or are used to," he said. "We're just getting into this loop of homogenization." In a separate paper published this month, Dehghani and other USC researchers argue that these homogenizing effects of LLMs on writing are carrying into human expression and thought, noting that the LLMs "reflect and reinforce" dominant styles of writing while also "marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies." Bovell, the futurist, says because data used to train AI comes from the internet, it tends to reflect the loudest and most dominant online voices, meaning groups and cultures that are historically marginalized typically aren't used in that training data, which adds to the homogenization. This problem is compounded, she said, by the fact that most AI we use comes from a handful of American companies. "At the end of the day," she said, these companies are "building the foundation of the future, and that's something that we all need to really think about." AI increasingly training on its own content John Licato, associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab at the University of South Florida, says the amount of AI and bot-generated content we're consuming is much higher than it's ever been, and will probably continue to increase. He says that determining the exact level of automated content versus human content is especially hard because humans amplify posts made by social media bots, and vice versa. WATCH | Your next job interview could be with AI: Are AI bots the future of job interviews? 2 months ago Have you done an interview with an AI bot? While the technology is still in its early stages, some say it frees up humans from tedious tasks while others say there are concerns about HR job losses. CBC's Ashley Fraser unpacks what the process is like. He says the internet has reached a point where it could continue to function in an imaginary scenario where humans stopped using it. That leads to another problem with machine learning, where generative AI systems trained on their own content produce increasingly worse and more biased results. This is something Licato says is already happening. "When you have AI that's continually trained on its own data, things like biases get worse after multiple generations. Mistakes get worse after every generation," he said. "That is the kind of thing that we would expect to happen if humans just dropped off the internet." The push to preserve diversity Those who study AI and language suggest there's still a lot to learn about this homogeneity and how to address it. In the USC paper published in August, the researchers concluded that "preserving and enhancing meaningful human diversity" has to be central to the design and development of AI. If we don't pay deliberate attention to that diversity, they warn, we won't be able to harness the full potential of the technology "without sacrificing the very diversity that defines human society." To push back against homogenization in LLMs and make them work in the public interest, Bovell says we have to figure out how to mould data in a way that's more diverse, something that's not always a priority for private companies. It's also important to have open-source models that allow anyone to modify them, Bovell says, as opposed to proprietary models like ChatGPT that don't make code and other details available to the public. She's encouraged that countries like Sweden have begun working on " sovereign AI" models to reflect their local cultures. Bovell says that if AI is going to impact and shape languages that are the shared fabric allowing society to reach consensus and move forward, "you want to make sure that these tools are reflective of the people in your population and the breadth and depth of the diversity there."
CBC
6 minutes ago
- CBC
How doctors are using AI in the exam room — and why it could become the norm
The Quebec government says it's launching a pilot project involving artificial intelligence transcription tools for health-care professionals, with an increasing number saying they cut down the time they spend filling paperwork.
CBC
6 minutes ago
- CBC
Doctors are turning to AI scribes to take medical notes. Quebec wants to test it out
Social Sharing Frustrated by overwhelming paperwork that eats into their time with patients, some doctors in Quebec have been turning to artificial intelligence tools to streamline the transcription of their medical notes during consultations. Now, Santé Québec, the Crown corporation that oversees the province's health-care network, is planning to launch a pilot project to look into these technologies with the goal of expanding their use in the health-care system. Dr. Felix Lê-Phat-Hô, a family physician based in Montreal, has been using one of the tools for a year and says it's reduced his mental load and improved his quality of service. "It has a huge impact in my clinical practice," he said of the tool Plume AI. Lê-Phat-Hô says the tool saves him from doing two to three hours of paperwork daily, allowing him to see up to three more patients a day. Right now, only applications that have obtained official certification from Santé Québec, guaranteeing data protection, can be used. Plume AI, which was created by a group of Quebec doctors, is one of these approved platforms. Its co-founder, emergency room physician Dr. James Tu, says 10 per cent of doctors in Quebec already use his application — about 2,000 doctors. For Lê-Phat-Hô, the benefits speak for themselves. "You get to focus your attention solely on the patient, and the patients really appreciate it because they can feel that they have their doctor's full attention." "So it's really like a win-win situation for both the patient and me." WATCH | How AI tools are helping doctors: How doctors are using AI in the exam room — and why it could become the norm 4 minutes ago The Quebec government says it's launching a pilot project involving artificial intelligence transcription tools for health-care professionals, with an increasing number saying they cut down the time they spend filling paperwork. How does it work? Plume AI is an application that doctors can download on their phones or their computers. At the beginning of the consultation, they explain to the patient what the application does and ask for consent before recording the exchange. If the patient accepts, the doctor starts the recording, and the consultation goes on like it normally would: the patient explains their problem, the doctor asks questions, talks about diagnosis and the treatment plan. "It doesn't matter what the flow of the discussion was, what the interview was, what the language was, what the patient's accent was," said Tu. "Thanks to artificial intelligence, it's able to grasp the context of each discussion." Once the consultation ends, the doctor stops the transcription, and Plume AI generates a structured medical note based on the discussion. This way, doctors don't need to take detailed notes during the consultations, or write up the medical note during it or at the end of their day, which Tu says can take an "enormous" amount of time. Instead, they can focus on the patient in front of them. He says he's able to see up to six more patients a day in the emergency room thanks to the technology. "That's what I studied for," he said "To talk to the patient, not to fill out paperwork." Canada now has a minister of artificial intelligence. What will he do? Cybersecurity concerns Lê-Phat-Hô says he was initially skeptical about using AI in his practice, worried about the risks to his patients' privacy. Éric Parent, a cybersecurity expert, shares this concern. He says the data would need to be stored as locally as possible and within a controlled environment to avoid risks, and that there should be a protocol to establish who is legally responsible for the data. He also hopes that startup companies leveraging this technology invest in strong security measures. "When you cut corners with cybersecurity… we're creating a dependency on this technology, so if the system, for example, becomes unavailable, then what would happen?" he said. "And so these systems have to be built to be at the security level or the resiliency level, the quality level that we actually need." Plume AI stores its data locally in Quebec, and new data gets erased automatically after 24 to 48 hours, measures that reassured Lê-Phat-Hô. Tu, the tool's co-founder, is hoping to collaborate with more health-care professionals that could benefit from the technology, such as nurses, social workers, physiotherapists and dentists. He's looking forward to potentially collaborating with Santé Quebec for the pilot project to study the impacts of this technology on the medical field. "I think that the entry of artificial intelligence into the world of health is inevitable. It must be regulated, must be well supervised, must have guidelines in place," he said. "But for once, we are able to have access to technology in the health system that is not so behind the times."
