DigitalOcean upgraded to buy as lower LLM token pricing should drive up demand: Stifel

Stifel upgraded DigitalOcean (DOCN) to Buy from Hold due in part to the higher adoption of open-weight models in the quarters ahead, which should lower token pricing and provide a long-term demand driver.

"Additionally, we institute what we view as conservative CY28 Rev/EPS estimates of $2.56B/$3.57, both above consensus ($2.45B/$2.91)," said Stifel analyst Brad Reback in an investor report. "We note our CY28 revenue estimate assumes DOCN monetizes its incremental ~100MW of capacity through CY27 at ~$15MW, and we assume ~$30M/MW of costs for this added capacity."

Stifel also increased its price target to $160 from $135.

DigitalOcean shares shot up 14.6% by the close of trading on Tuesday after the cloud infrastructure provider announced it plans to increase prices for select Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) AI GPU instances beginning Aug. 1, citing strong demand for advanced AI compute capacity.  

"While management had already announced an additional ~20MW of capacity coming online late CY27/early CY28 with its early July pre-announcement, we believe the recent debt-for-equity conversion frees up financing for future capacity given management's commitment to staying <4x net leverage," Reback noted. "Our newly introduced CY28 revenue estimates only reflect the already announced ~155MW of capacity."

The analysts at Baird were also positive on DigitalOcean's story, initiating coverage with an Outperform rating and $165 price target.

"We view DOCN as well positioned to benefit from acceleration in inference compute and view its full-stack approach as a differentiator," said Baird analyst Rob Oliver in an investor report.

"DigitalOcean is an AI-native cloud with an integrated architecture spanning from the infrastructure all the way to managed agents," Oliver added. "Importantly, DigitalOcean positions itself around open-sourced engines, which reinforces its zero-lock-in portability thesis. This provides customers with flexibility across the platform/models and the ability to leverage the most efficient model based on each task. AI natives are increasingly adopting open source across their internal stack."

DigitalOcean plans to release its second quarter 2026 financial results on August 4. A consensus estimate expects adjusted earnings per share of $0.26 and revenue of $277.5M. During the same quarter last year, the neocloud reported adjusted EPS of $0.59 and revenue of $218.7M.