Many years ago, businesses would collect customer and operational data and store it on physical servers located on-site. Today, they rent hardware capacity from enormous, centralized data centers instead for a fraction of the cost, which is a practice called cloud computing.

Data-center operators like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and 's Google Cloud dominate the cloud industry. Their services have expanded way beyond simple data storage to include hundreds of different solutions designed to help businesses thrive in the digital age, and a growing number of them center around artificial intelligence (AI).

DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) is another cloud computing company, except it focuses specifically on serving small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It's now expanding into AI to give its customers access to the technology at an affordable price. It could be an incredible growth opportunity, so here's why investors might be glad they bought DigitalOcean stock when they look back on this moment in five years.

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Source Fool.com