AMD CPU Rally

Advanced Micro Devices jumped 13.9% on Friday after Intel’s earnings convinced Wall Street that artificial intelligence is driving a new boom in central processors. (finance.yahoo.com) (intc.com) AMD closed at $347.81 after touching $352.99 intraday, both records, and its market capitalization moved above $500 billion for the first time. (finance.yahoo.com) (cnbc.com) (morningstar.com) The immediate trigger was Intel’s first-quarter report on April 23, which showed $13.6 billion in revenue, adjusted earnings of $0.29 a share, and second-quarter guidance above analyst estimates. (intc.com) (cnbc.com) Intel said Data Center and AI revenue rose 22% to $5.1 billion, and Chief Executive Lip-Bu Tan said the “next wave of AI” is increasing demand for CPUs as workloads move toward inference and agentic systems. (intc.com) (cnbc.com) A CPU is the general-purpose chip that runs the logic of a server, while a graphics processing unit, or GPU, is the specialized chip that has dominated AI training. Inference is the stage where a model answers prompts, and chip executives now say that stage needs more CPUs to feed data, manage memory, and coordinate work. (reuters.com) (cnbc.com) That read-through lifted AMD because it is Intel’s main rival in server and personal-computer CPUs, and because investors took Intel’s demand signal as evidence that AMD can sell more of its own processors into the same buildout. (finance.yahoo.com) (reuters.com) D.A. Davidson upgraded AMD to Buy from Neutral and set a $375 price target after Intel’s report. Gil Luria wrote that Intel’s numbers showed CPU demand was already translating into “very significant upside.” (finance.yahoo.com) (morningstar.com) Reuters reported that at least 23 brokerages raised price targets on Intel after the quarter, a sign that analysts are reworking assumptions for the whole processor market rather than for one company alone. (reuters.com) The catch is valuation. Even after Friday’s move, Yahoo Finance listed AMD’s one-year analyst target estimate at $292.39, well below the closing price, showing how fast the stock has outrun older forecasts. (finance.yahoo.com) AMD reports earnings on May 5. After Intel’s quarter, investors are no longer asking only how many AI accelerators AMD can sell; they are asking how much of the AI buildout still runs on CPUs. (finance.yahoo.com) (intc.com)