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- Servers, Search, and Security Walk Into a Rally, and One Chip Stock Leaves With the Tab
Servers, Search, and Security Walk Into a Rally, and One Chip Stock Leaves With the Tab
AI spend is spreading beyond the obvious winners, and one chip name keeps cashing the check.
Noah Zelvis
March 24, 2026
The AI trade is starting to look a little less one-note. It is no longer just about the biggest GPU headline or whichever mega-cap says AI the most times on a call.
Some of the more interesting setups now sit in the supporting cast: security names helping companies clean up the mess, search software turning data into something useful, and one chip stock quietly benefiting as bigger, faster systems need better plumbing underneath.
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Music Streaming
Spotify Wants You To Fall Down A Music Rabbit Hole
Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) has launched SongDNA, a new feature that lets Premium subscribers trace the hidden connections behind their favorite tracks.
Think of it as a musical family tree — who wrote it, who produced it, who sampled it, who covered it, and what other projects those collaborators touched.
The feature builds on Spotify's existing About the Song tool but goes much deeper.
It pulls together writers, producers, samples, interpolations, and cover versions into a single interactive experience.
It is the kind of rabbit hole music nerds have always wanted inside a streaming app.
Built On Data Spotify Bought For This Exact Moment
SongDNA runs partly on data from WhoSampled, the community-built music database Spotify acquired last year.
That acquisition now makes a lot more sense — it gave Spotify the connective tissue needed to map relationships between songs, artists, and collaborators at scale.
Discovery Through Context, Not Just Algorithms
Spotify has spent years recommending music based on listening patterns and algorithms.
SongDNA takes a different approach — letting users discover music through creative lineage rather than data-driven guesses.
The feature is rolling out in beta globally on iOS and Android for Premium users, with full availability expected in April.
TIDAL offers a similar interactive credits feature, but Spotify's scale gives SongDNA reach that competitors cannot match.
Enterprise Software
The Future Of IBM Consulting Is A Screen Full Of Digital Workers
IBM's (NYSE: IBM) consulting division is running AI agents at scale and monitoring their output through a real-time dashboard called Consulting Advantage.
The platform lets human consultants see exactly what digital workers are doing, when they are doing it, and whether the results need intervention.
IBM built the tool internally in 2024 and began shipping a client-facing version, Enterprise Advantage, earlier this year.
AI agents are now working alongside humans on more than 150 client engagements. Somewhere in there, a few consultants are wondering if they are training their replacements.
45 Minutes Down To A Couple Of Minutes
The clearest proof point comes from security operations.
A typical alert investigation used to take a human analyst about 45 minutes to comb through logs, identify the issue, and decide next steps.
IBM's AI agents now generate an investigation plan, execute it in real time, run a risk analysis, and produce a report — all in minutes.
IBM Is Eating Its Own Consulting Model
IBM Consulting pulled in $21 billion in revenue in 2025, driven largely by demand for AI solutions.
The company is now using itself as the proof of concept — deploying AI agents internally before selling the same setup to clients.
It is a smart play. Nothing sells enterprise AI like showing a client the dashboard you already use to run your own business.
IBM is betting that the consulting firm of the future looks less like a team of advisors and more like a control tower managing fleets of digital workers.
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Cybersecurity
Broadcom Gives Small Security Teams Enterprise-Grade Weapons
Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) has launched Symantec CBX, a cloud-based security platform that merges Symantec's prevention and data security tools with Carbon Black's endpoint detection and response technology.
It is the first time both product lines have been unified into a single solution since Broadcom acquired them.
The platform combines secure web gateway filtering, adaptive protection, incident prediction, and deep endpoint visibility into one interface.
Broadcom is not targeting the companies that already have massive security operations centers. It is going after those who wish they did.
Built For Teams Running On Fumes
CBX is aimed squarely at organizations facing enterprise-grade threats without the resources to match.
These are security teams dealing with staffing shortages, tight budgets, and increasingly sophisticated attackers who no longer go after the big fish.
The platform uses AI to correlate signals across endpoints, networks, the cloud, identity, and data into high-confidence incidents, rather than flooding analysts with low-quality alerts.
It can predict an attacker's next four to five moves and includes an AI assistant trained on threat intelligence to guide investigations.
Security Through Obscurity Is Officially Dead
Smaller organizations used to avoid attention from advanced threat actors simply by being small. That era is over.
Nation-state-level adversaries and AI-driven attacks now hit organizations of every size, and Broadcom is betting that the biggest underserved market in cybersecurity is the one that could never afford proper defenses.
CBX is Broadcom's answer — premium protection packaged for teams that previously had to make do with duct tape and hope.
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Recent Tech Movers
SentinelOne (NYSE: S)
Security That Is Trying to Be More Than a Buzzword
SentinelOne put up a decent quarter, with revenue up 20% year over year to $271.2 million, but the bigger story is that it keeps trying to evolve from a single-product cyber name into something broader and stickier.
That matters, because the market is getting less patient with flashy security stories that do not translate into durable platform value.
The rub is that management’s profit outlook came in a bit lighter than Wall Street wanted, and competition in cybersecurity is still brutal.
Still, if enterprises keep consolidating vendors and looking for AI-assisted defense tools that actually save time, SentinelOne may keep finding room to grow into a more credible enterprise software story.
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG)
The AI Boom Still Needs a Place to Put the Data
Pure Storage is one of those names that benefits when AI goes from flashy demo to real deployment.
Its fiscal fourth-quarter revenue topped $1 billion, full-year revenue passed $3.6 billion, and fourth-quarter remaining performance obligations grew more than 40% year over year.
That is a nice reminder that all the compute excitement still needs storage, data movement, and infrastructure that does not choke when workloads get bigger.
This is not the sexiest corner of tech, which may be exactly why it works.
When budgets shift from experimentation to actual implementation, practical names tend to get a second look.
Pure may not give you a dramatic AI headline every week, but it is sitting in a lane that could stay very relevant as enterprise buildouts continue.
Elastic (NYSE: ESTC)
Search Is Suddenly Looking Pretty Useful Again
Elastic reported third-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of $450 million, up 18% year over year, with subscription revenue up 19%.
That matters because search, observability, and security are all becoming more valuable as companies try to make sense of bigger piles of data and more complicated systems.
AI gets a lot more useful when the underlying information is actually organized and accessible.
What makes this name interesting is that it feels practical. It is not trying to win the AI beauty contest.
It is trying to help businesses find things, monitor things, and secure things in a world where everything is multiplying at once. That is not flashy, but it may be durable.
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The Long Pick
Credo Technology (NASDAQ: CRDO)
Why This Name Is Working
Credo is the kind of stock that can get overlooked until the numbers become too loud to ignore.
The company sells high-speed, energy-efficient connectivity solutions for data infrastructure, which is a very polished way of saying it helps massive systems move data around without wasting as much power or creating as many bottlenecks.
In an AI market obsessed with bigger clusters and faster networks, that is not side-character stuff anymore.
Its latest quarter was a proper attention-grabber. Revenue hit $407 million, up 201.5% year over year and 51.9% quarter over quarter, while non-GAAP EPS came in at $1.07.
Those are the kinds of numbers that make investors stop pretending this is just a niche semiconductor story.
The AI buildout is getting so large that the pipes underneath it are starting to matter almost as much as the processors doing the flashy work.
Scorecard You Can Use
Real AI Exposure: This is tied to infrastructure demand, not just AI branding. As networks grow more complex, connectivity becomes more valuable.
Efficiency Matters: Power is becoming part of the AI investment case. Anything that helps systems move faster while using less energy has a better shot at staying relevant.
Big Growth, Small Spotlight: The company is growing fast, but it still does not get talked about like the giant chip names. Sometimes that is where the interesting setups live.
Why The Market Cares
The market is slowly figuring out that AI infrastructure is not just about who makes the loudest processor. It is also about who helps the whole machine run better.
If hyperscalers and enterprise customers keep spending aggressively on bigger systems, then data movement, interconnect, and efficiency become more important, not less.
That gives Credo a pretty clean seat at the table.
What Could Spook It
The obvious risk is expectations. Once a stock starts posting monster growth, investors can get rude fast if the next quarter looks merely good instead of absurd.
It also lives in a hardware ecosystem where customer concentration, spending pauses, or even a general AI sentiment wobble can create some ugly short-term swings.
What To Watch Next
Watch for signs that hyperscale demand stays strong, that new design wins keep showing up, and that revenue growth remains broad enough to support the story.
If Credo keeps proving it is not just a lucky side beneficiary of the AI spending wave, this may keep looking like one of the quieter but smarter ways to play the theme.
Bottom Line:
The market still loves the stars, but the supporting cast is starting to get paid too.
If AI spending keeps spreading into infrastructure, security, and data management, this chip name may keep walking away with more than its share of the tab.
Everything Else
🤖 OpenAI’s risk list is getting longer as Microsoft dependence and legal fights keep piling up.
💻 Microsoft may be stuck in a rough patch, but the bigger case for sticking around is still very much alive.
📈 Synopsys caught a fresh rally after an Elliott stake gave the stock a new reason to wake up.
🍎 Apple is bringing WWDC back on June 8, with its developer event set to spotlight software, tools, and more AI updates.
🏭 The ECB thinks AI could lift euro-zone productivity over the next decade, if companies actually put it to work.
That's our coverage for today; thanks for reading! Reply to this email with feedback or any tech stocks you want me to check out.
Best Regards,
—Noah Zelvis
Tech Stock Insider