DigitalOcean Accelerates AI and Cloud Computing Growth with Expanded Product Portfolio

This Cloud Computing Company Is Waking Up to Its $251 Billion Opportunity | The Motley Fool

DigitalOcean (DOCN 0.17%) has established itself as a simpler alternative to megacloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. For individual developers and small businesses without vast IT budgets or the willingness to scale the steep learning curves associated with AWS, DigitalOcean is an appealing option. With a new CEO taking over in early 2024, DigitalOcean has accelerated its efforts to capture the market for cloud computing and AI without the hassle. CEO Paddy Srinivasan faces a tough balancing act: Keep the platform simple while expanding its capabilities to go after larger clients. The prize is $251 billion in expected spending by 2028 from individuals and companies with fewer than 500 employees on infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. One of the biggest changes for DigitalOcean under Srinivasan has been speed. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the company released more than four times as many product features as it did in the fourth quarter of 2023. Recent product launches include GPU-enabled virtual servers, the GenAI platform for generative AI workloads, and multiple load balancing products. While piling on products and features risks complicating the platform, capturing bigger-spending customers requires a more complete product portfolio. This strategy already appears to be working. DigitalOcean now has more than 500 customers spending at least $100,000 annually. This small group of customers accounted for 22% of revenue in the fourth quarter, and it's growing far faster than any other customer group. Annual recurring revenue from this group jumped 37% year over year in the fourth quarter. DigitalOcean also managed to improve its net dollar retention rate in the fourth quarter, pushing up that metric from 97% to 99%. While anything below 100% means that customers are contracting spending, this metric is now trending in the right direction. As the company expands its product portfolio, its largest customers will have more opportunities to increase spending. DigitalOcean is taking a smart approach to AI. Instead of building massive AI datacenters and hoping that demand will materialize, the company is focusing on areas where it's already seeing customer demand. DigitalOcean launched virtual servers with GPUs last October, and its GenAI platform enables customers to deploy AI agents without managing infrastructure. While investments in AI infrastructure are necessary to power any AI products, the company sees its biggest opportunities at the platform and application layers rather than at the infrastructure layer. By making the deployment of AI applications and agents quick and easy, DigitalOcean believes it can differentiate itself from the competition. The company isn't going to win the battle of who can buy the most GPUs or train the best AI model, but it can build high-value products that make deploying AI easier for its customers. DigitalOcean has ramped up its capital spending to support its AI products, but the company still produces plenty of free cash flow. DigitalOcean poured $178 million into capital expenditures in 2024, up from $119 million the year before, but it still converted 17% of revenue into free cash flow. For 2025, it expects between 16% and 18% of revenue to be converted into free cash flow. With an increased pace of product launches and a larger focus on winning high-spending customers, DigitalOcean is in the early innings of rekindling its revenue growth. The company sees revenue growing by 11.5% to 14% this year, about the same as the 13% growth rate it managed in 2024. This assumes a stable demand environment, something that could be upended if businesses pull back on spending. Beyond 2025, a more complete product portfolio should help DigitalOcean retain customers and boost per-customer spending. CFO Matt Steinfort noted during the fourth-quarter earnings call that customers "graduating" from DigitalOcean's platform has been a problem in the past. These customers would get big enough and move on to a competitor, depriving the company of its most valuable type of customer. With the quicker pace of product innovation, Steinfort sees this problem subsiding. While DigitalOcean's long-term market opportunity hasn't changed, its ability to tap into cloud computing spending from individuals and smaller businesses has improved thanks to its focus on quickly building out a more complete product portfolio. While growth won't accelerate overnight, DigitalOcean's strategy looks likely to pay off for investors in the long run.

This Magnificent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock Is Skyrocketing. It Could Still Double | The Motley Fool

DigitalOcean (DOCN 0.17%) has been in fine form on the stock market in 2025, and it looks like the cloud computing provider's bull run is here to stay following the release of its latest quarterly results that sent its shares soaring. Shares of the company shot up nearly 10% following the release of its fourth-quarter 2024 results on Feb. 25. DigitalOcean, which provides on-demand cloud computing infrastructure to start-ups, developers, and small businesses, crushed Wall Street's earnings expectations by a big margin. Its revenue was also better than expected. Even better, its guidance was ahead of what analysts were looking for. Let's look at the reasons why DigitalOcean's results were solid and check why this tech stock remains worth buying even now. DigitalOcean finished 2024 with a 13% year-over-year increase in revenue to $781 million, while its adjusted earnings increased 21% from the prior year to $1.92 per share. The company is anticipating identical revenue growth in 2025, while its bottom-line performance could be flat at the midpoint of its guidance range. The flat bottom-line performance that DigitalOcean is anticipating this year can be attributed to the capacity investments the company is making to fulfill the demand for its AI-related offerings. That's not surprising, as the demand for DigitalOcean's AI offerings has been so strong that the company ran out of capacity. For example, DigitalOcean launched its AI infrastructure deployment platform, Droplets, in October last year. This platform allows developers to rent powerful graphics processing units (GPUs), such as Nvidia's H100, which they can use to train large language models (LLMs) to build and deploy AI applications. This service enables DigitalOcean customers to implement AI applications without having to invest in expensive hardware, which explains why the demand was robust last quarter. As a result, DigitalOcean's Droplets platform "quickly ran out of capacity after launching at the beginning of Q4," and the company is now allocating more of its GPU capacity for this offering. DigitalOcean is building a new data center in Atlanta which is set to come online in the current quarter. It says that this facility will give it "incremental capacity for both AI and our core cloud offerings, but also gives us a lower cost facility and is part of our longer-term data center optimization strategy." This is a smart strategy, as investments in AI infrastructure capacity should pave the way for impressive long-term growth at DigitalOcean. After all, the market for cloud-based AI services is expected to jump by more than 6x between 2023 and 2030, according to Fortune Business Insights. DigitalOcean itself points out that its total addressable market for both cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) could increase at an annual rate of 22% through 2028, hitting $251 billion at the end of the forecast period. DigitalOcean's 2024 revenue suggests that it could be at the beginning of a massive growth curve. The good part is that the company is well on its way to making the most of this huge opportunity by adding new customers at a nice clip and also winning more business from existing customers. For instance, DigitalOcean's average revenue per user (ARPU) increased by an impressive 14% year over year in the previous quarter, up by eight percentage points when compared to the year-ago period. What's more, the company witnessed a solid year-over-year jump of 37% in the number of customers with an annual revenue run rate of more than $100,000 on its solutions. The strong adoption of DigitalOcean's offerings is likely to continue in the future as it shores up its AI infrastructure and attracts more customers, while also winning a bigger share of existing customers' wallets. Though DigitalOcean's bottom-line growth is expected to remain flat in 2025, analysts are expecting the company to clock double-digit growth over the next couple of years. However, don't be surprised to see DigitalOcean outperforming analysts' expectations, thanks to the AI-specific opportunity that it is targeting and the jump in spending by customers on its cloud platform. But even if DigitalOcean's earnings jump to $2.60 per share after a couple of years, and it trades at 34 times earnings at that time, in line with the Nasdaq-100 index's earnings multiple (using the index as a proxy for tech stocks), its stock price could jump to $88. That would be just over double DigitalOcean's current stock price. The fact that DigitalOcean is currently trading at just 22 times forward earnings means that investors are getting a great deal on this AI stock right now. They may want to consider buying it right away, before it soars higher in the long run.