AMD Shares Hit All-Time High As Price Target Raised

AMD shares (NASDAQ: AMD) briefly made a fresh all-time high of $639 today before pulling back to $632, as Bank of America lifted its price target on the chipmaker to $720, citing a structural surge in CPU demand driven by the rise of agentic artificial intelligence. The upgrade underscores a growing conviction on Wall Street that the next phase of AI infrastructure build-out extends well beyond GPU accelerators and into the broader compute stack.

The stock has staged a remarkable run in recent months, crossing the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold for the first time and posting gains of 182.9% year-to-date.

AMD Upgraded

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya raised his 12-month price target on AMD shares from $620 to $720 while maintaining a Buy rating, representing upside of roughly 14% from current levels. Alongside the target increase, Arya revised his calendar year 2027 and 2028 estimates for AMD higher by 2% and 3%, respectively, reflecting growing confidence in the company’s medium-term earnings trajectory.

The centerpiece of the upgrade is BofA’s dramatically expanded view of the server CPU total addressable market. The firm now models that market growing from $61 billion in calendar year 2026 to $211 billion by calendar year 2030, a roughly 246% increase over four years. That projection is anchored in the shift from conventional generative AI, which relies predominantly on GPU clusters for large-scale parallel inference, to agentic AI systems that require multi-step reasoning, automated decision-making, code execution, vector database lookups, and system-wide orchestration. Those workloads are inherently sequential and latency-sensitive, making them well-suited to high-core-count CPUs rather than pure GPU acceleration.

A key catalyst for BofA’s revised thesis is the recently announced infrastructure deal between cloud provider Akamai Technologies and AI laboratory Anthropic. The agreement, valued at $11.6 billion over seven years with potential expansion to $20 billion, is structured around CPU-heavy cloud infrastructure designed to support Anthropic’s agentic AI deployments. While AMD is not confirmed as the exclusive chip supplier for the arrangement, BofA views the deal as concrete industry validation that the agentic era demands a significant scaling of CPU compute nodes relative to traditional GPU-centric data center architectures.

AMD’s own operational momentum supports the bullish narrative. The company reported record data center revenue of $11.5 billion in its most recent quarter, representing year-over-year growth of more than 50%, and guided third-quarter total revenue to approximately $13 billion. On the product side, AMD’s forthcoming Venice generation of EPYC server CPUs, which will feature up to 256 cores per socket, is specifically designed to address high-density head-node and orchestration workloads in agentic AI server racks. The company’s Helios rack-scale systems are also positioned to capture spending in this emerging infrastructure category.

What Lay Ahead

Wall Street’s consensus on AMD remains overwhelmingly positive, with more than 30 analysts carrying Buy or equivalent ratings on the stock. The BofA upgrade adds further weight to a thesis that has been building since AMD demonstrated its ability to compete directly with Nvidia in the data center GPU market, and now extends that competitive positioning into the server CPU space, where AMD’s EPYC processors have already gained meaningful share against Intel’s Xeon lineup.

That said, several risk factors warrant attention. AMD faces intensifying competition in the AI infrastructure space from Arm-based custom silicon, which major hyperscalers including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have been deploying at scale to reduce dependence on x86 architectures. Nvidia’s Grace and Vera CPU platforms, tightly integrated with its GPU ecosystems, represent a further competitive pressure point in enterprise deployments. Supply chain constraints also loom as a potential friction point, with surging demand for advanced packaging and leading-edge wafer capacity placing pressure on foundry partners including TSMC.