Analyst upgrades AMD to Strong Buy, cites 40% upside potential
Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold raised his rating on AMD to Strong Buy and set a new price target of $641, suggesting the stock could rise about 40% from current levels.
Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold upgraded his rating on AMD to Strong Buy from Outperform in a note released Tuesday and lifted his price target to $641, up from $565, implying roughly a 40% upside from the current share price. The target exceeds the average of his peers, which stands at $613, according to Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace data, and follows a post-earnings sell-off earlier in the month. About 72% of Wall Street analysts covering AMD rate the stock as a Strong Buy or Buy, and the shares rose about 5% in afternoon trading after the upgrade.
Leopold said AMD’s AI-focused chips position the company as a key player in the emerging agent-driven workforce and highlighted a projected 44% compound annual growth rate for the server CPU market through 2030, reaching roughly $201 billion.
"AMD offers the strongest combination of direct earnings leverage, datacenter positioning and market-share gains," Leopold said.
AMD reported record second-quarter results, posting non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.66 versus consensus estimates of $1.61 and revenue of $11.5 billion, a 50% year-over-year increase that beat analysts’ $11.34 billion forecast. The Data Center segment drove the performance, with revenue more than doubling to $6.7 billion on strong demand for EPYC server CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators.
The company forecast server CPU revenue to grow 80% year over year in the second half of 2026 and 70% in 2027, and expects data-center revenue to more than double in 2027, with AI GPU sales rising well over 100%. AMD also unveiled its next-generation Instinct MI450 GPUs and 6th-gen EPYC Venice CPUs, designed for the Helios rack-scale AI system that integrates GPUs, CPUs, networking and software for large AI models.
AMD announced that Microsoft will deploy Helios across Azure AI services starting in the second half of 2026, and that Anthropic will install up to 2 GW of Instinct MI450 GPUs in its Helios system in early 2027. The Anthropic partnership could be worth tens of billions of dollars, and AMD pledged up to $5 billion in investment, one of its largest strategic commitments.