Shares of Advanced Micro Devices, lifted recently by partnerships with major players in artificial intelligence, could keep gaining regardless of stiff competition among chip makers.
That is the view from analysts at BofA Securities, who raised their target for the stock price to $300 from $250. They cited "positive announcements" at a conference held this week by the Open Compute Project in San Jose, Calif.
The stock was down 1% to $232.35 on Friday, a level leaving room for a gain of more than 29% to BofA Securities' target. Intel and Nvidia were each up 0.3%.
The analysts said Friday they now have a clearer outlook on the deployment of AMD's coming Helios server racks, designed to hold 72 of the company's MI450 Series graphics processing units, which power AI workloads. The racks are scheduled to arrive on the market in the second half of 2026.
Industry players including Oracle, Meta Platforms, and OpenAI will support the rollout through their partnerships with AMD, the analysts said. This includes the launch of a Helios rack specifically designed for Meta data centers, which was showcased at the event.
AMD said Tuesday that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would serve as a launch partner for the first publicly available AI "supercluster" powered by its Instinct MI450 GPUs, starting in the third quarter of 2026.
Shares have gained 5.3% since that announcement. Separately, AMD secured a long-term deal to supply OpenAI with Instinct GPUs earlier this month.
The Helios rack-scale platform is seen as a bid to compete directly with Nvidia. While that is a challenge, considering Nvidia's dominance in chips for AI, AMD has a strong position relative to Intel, the analysts said.
This is true in the market for personal computer chips as well as central processing units for servers, where Intel's processors have lost the ability to compete with offerings from AMD and Arm Holdings.
Citi Research analysts said on Thursday that AI-related semiconductor plays such as AMD and Monolithic Power Systems should have the best results and outlooks in what they expect will be "a varied earnings season."
"We expect above-Consensus results from PC and server related companies such as Intel and AMD given order trends were strong all quarter," the analysts said. Citi rates AMD at Neutral with a $215 price target.