Morgan Stanley Puts Buy Ratings on Alibaba, Grab, Cadence, Global Payments and SpaceX Ahead of Earnings and a Lockup Deadline

Morgan Stanley is making a lot of bets this week, and they all rhyme.

According to CNBC, the bank's analysts are telling investors to buy Alibaba, Grab, Cadence Design Systems and Natera before their next earnings reports hit. Separately, according to Business Insider, Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore is telling clients the recent selloff in memory chip stocks is a buying opportunity, not a warning sign. And according to Stocktwits and TradingView, the bank is also standing behind SpaceX ahead of an August 6 lockup expiration and upgrading payment processor Global Payments ahead of its own earnings.

Five different tickers. One theme: AI infrastructure spending isn't slowing down, according to Morgan Stanley, and the market is underpricing that.

Alibaba, Grab and Cadence

Analyst Gary Yu is sticking with Alibaba as a top pick heading into earnings expected in late August, according to CNBC. His reasoning: Alibaba runs the largest cloud infrastructure in China and should grab market share as AI computing demand ramps up there. Yu actually cut his price target to $180 from $190, but kept the buy call anyway, citing cash flow, dividends and buybacks. Alibaba shares are up 17% this month, according to CNBC.

Grab, the Southeast Asian ride-hailing and delivery company, got a price target bump to $6.25 from $5.90 from analyst Divya Gangahar, who expects second-quarter revenue up 22% and adjusted EBITDA of $166 million when the company reports in early August. Shares are down 12% this month regardless, according to CNBC.

Cadence Design Systems, which makes electronic design automation software used to build chips, reports Monday. Analyst Lee Simpson kept an Overweight rating and a $370 price target, telling clients the stock's 13% drop in July has created a buying opportunity. Simpson's argument leans on "agentic AI" as a competitive moat for the company.

The memory chip case

The more interesting call is on memory stocks. Business Insider reported that the Roundhill Memory ETF fell into a bear market before rebounding this week, and Morgan Stanley's Joseph Moore says that swing was predictable and shouldn't scare anyone off.

Moore's argument is that DRAM memory chips have become the actual bottleneck for AI data center buildouts, not GPUs. "This is not a normal cycle," he wrote, according to Business Insider. He says AI spending growth north of 50% matters more each year because AI is becoming a bigger share of total chip demand, and that consumer electronics weakness is masking how strong the data-center-driven memory market actually is.

Moore isn't alone. Bank of America and UBS analysts also said this week that memory demand remains robust despite the volatility, according to Business Insider.

Memory stocks whipsawed into a bear market partly because, as Moore himself admitted, "the memory trade has become crowded." A bet that a bottleneck is durable is still a bet. Semiconductor cycles have burned bullish analysts before, and Moore's own framing, that this time the boom needs to last years rather than one, is an admission that the downside case, a shorter cycle, is on the table.

SpaceX's lockup cliff

The SpaceX story is a different kind of catalyst. According to Stocktwits, SpaceX's IPO lockup expires August 6, 2026, freeing early shareholders to sell. Many investors reportedly expect the stock to fall toward $100 once that happens. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas disagrees, keeping an Overweight rating and a $300 price target, arguing that a drop to $100 would price in "little or no value" for SpaceX's AI business while also undervaluing its launch and satellite connectivity operations.

Not everyone on Wall Street agrees. Morningstar analyst Nicolas Owens said a "wave" of selling is likely once the lockup lifts, according to Stocktwits. That's a direct, named counterpoint to Jonas's bullish call, not a hedge. As of Friday, SPCX shares were down 4.7% and headed for a third straight weekly decline. SpaceX is expected to report quarterly results on August 4, with analysts polled by Fiscal.ai projecting $6.8 billion in revenue and a loss of $0.22 per share, estimates, not actuals.

Global Payments gets an upgrade

Morgan Stanley also upgraded Global Payments to Overweight from Equal Weight, according to TradingView, calling the shares "fundamentally too cheap" ahead of second-quarter results expected August 5. The bank's channel checks reportedly found improving customer sentiment toward the company's Genius and Worldpay products among small business and enterprise clients. GPN trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 31, per Morgan Stanley, and got a new $100 price target, up from $65.

Koyfin data cited by TradingView shows 20 of 34 analysts covering GPN still rate it a hold, and only 12 rate it a buy. GPN shares are down more than 6% over the past year. Morgan Stanley is going against the grain here, not confirming a consensus.

What's actually unresolved

Every one of these calls rests on the same assumption: that AI infrastructure spending keeps growing at its current pace through 2026 and into 2027. If cloud capex slows, if memory demand cools faster than Moore expects, or if SpaceX's lockup selloff proves Morningstar right instead of Morgan Stanley, these price targets get revisited fast. The earnings reports over the next two weeks, Cadence Monday, SpaceX August 4, Global Payments August 5, will be the first real test of whether the bank's optimism holds up against actual numbers instead of analyst models.