AMD shares hit a record high, adding over $86 billion in market value

AMD stock jumped 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday, according to StockTwits. The surge reportedly followed blowout quarterly results and upbeat guidance. Shares hit an all-time high, adding over $86 billion in market value if gains hold.

Advanced Micro Devices beat Q1 estimates with $1.37 per share pro forma earnings on $10.3 billion in sales, up 38% year over year, per Yahoo Finance. Gross margins rose to 53%. Operating margins hit 14%, says Reuters.

Analyst upgrades fuel momentum

StockTwits reported Goldman Sachs upgraded AMD to Buy from Neutral. It raised the price target to $450 from $240, implying 27% upside. Roth Capital lifted its target to $500 from $300, keeping a Buy rating. 

Perplexity noted Citi placed AMD on positive catalyst watch despite a price target cut to $248 from $260. It cited expanding server CPU market share.

Erste Group upgraded to Buy, per Investing.com. Analyst Hans Engel expects 32% Q1 2026 revenue growth from data center demand.

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Agentic AI drives CPU demand

According to Yahoo Finance, CEO Lisa Su said demand signals point to server CPU market growth over 35% annually to more than $120 billion by 2030. This shift from training to inference and agentic AI favors AMD's x86 architecture.

"Based on the demand signals we are seeing today and the structural increase in CPU compute requirements driven by agentic AI, we now expect the server CPU TAM to grow at greater than 35% annually, reaching over $120 billion by 2030," Su said, as reported by StockTwits.

Q2 guidance calls for $11.2 billion in sales, up 9% sequentially and 46% year over year. Su noted strong demand for MI450 AI chips.

Broader chip rally ignites

The rally spread globally. Reuters said Intel rose 1.9%, Arm Holdings 10.1%, and Qualcomm 1.6%. Super Micro surged 14.3% after its own strong forecast.

The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index hit a record, up 2.7%, according to Reuters. S&P 500 chipmakers eye 109.8% Q1 earnings growth. Samsung hit a $1 trillion market cap on AI hype.

"AMD's story is no longer just about having a GPU pipeline to challenge Nvidia... It's increasingly about a broader compute opportunity, with CPUs and GPUs both playing a role as AI workloads become more demanding," said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, according to Reuters.

AMD trades at 42.4 times forward earnings, above its five-year average, Reuters confirms. At least 20 brokerages raised targets, with Evercore ISI at $579 highest.