Raymond James Puts a $641 Price Tag on AMD's Bid to Dethrone Intel

Raymond James has put one of Wall Street's sharper AMD targets on the board, but the real bet isn't the stock price. It's that server CPUs become a much bigger part of the AI buildout than investors used to assume.

You don't often see a broker lift a target by $76 in one call. Raymond James did it on August 25, when analyst Simon Leopold upgraded AMD to Strong Buy from Outperform and raised his price target to $641 from $565. Investing.com reported that the note tied the move to a larger server CPU forecast, not just another round of Nvidia-adjacent AI enthusiasm. AMD shares closed at $456.75 that day, according to TipRanks, and were at $521.10 by September 9, based on Nasdaq closing data cited by Benzinga and Schwab. It moved fast. The gap has narrowed.

The case rests on one number: $201 billion. That's what Raymond James now expects the server CPU market to be worth by 2030, growing at a 44% five-year compound annual rate. The firm splits that total into about $33.5 billion from conventional data center CPUs, $83 billion from AI head-end CPUs and $85 billion from agentic CPUs. Those are ugly category names, but the point is simple. CPUs are no longer just the dull part of the server bill.

Leopold's argument uses Raymond James's AI Factory framework, which treats server CPUs as a growing input to AI systems rather than a mature market waiting to be squeezed. Persistent AI agents still need orchestration, retrieval, databases, sandboxes and tool execution. Much of that runs on CPUs. If you're buying AMD now, that's the part of the note you need to take seriously, because a $641 target only works if the processor market itself gets bigger.

AMD Is Winning Pricier Server Sockets

AMD's own numbers give Raymond James plenty to work with. In its August 4 second-quarter results, AMD said data center revenue reached $6.7 billion, up 107% from a year earlier, driven by EPYC processors and Instinct GPUs. The company guided third-quarter revenue to about $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million, with the midpoint up 41% year over year. That isn't a soft backdrop. It's a demand cycle with real revenue under it.

The share data is just as blunt. UBS figures reported by Yahoo Finance showed AMD with 27.4% of server CPU unit share in the first quarter of 2026, while Intel held 54.9% and Arm reached 17.7%. On revenue share inside x86 servers, AMD was much closer to Intel: 46.2% for AMD against 53.8% for Intel. That tells you AMD isn't merely shipping more chips. It's taking higher-value sockets.

That flip matters.

Intel is not collapsing. It reported second-quarter revenue of $16.1 billion, up 25% year over year, and said its Data Center and AI unit grew 59% to $6.3 billion. Lip-Bu Tan's company still has scale, factory clout and a huge installed base. But AMD's data center segment, at $6.7 billion in the same quarter, edged past Intel's DCAI revenue. Five years ago, that would have sounded like a stretch. Now it's in the filings.

The Stock Has Already Heard The Story

Here's the thing: AMD shares didn't need Raymond James to discover the trend. TIKR wrote on September 6 that the stock had risen about 136% since March 28 and had closed at $477.57 on September 4 after touching $522 in late June. By September 9 it was back near that June high: $521.10. Not exactly overlooked. Call $641 bullish if you like - you still can't call it ignored.

At the September 9 close, Raymond James's new target implied about 23% upside. That's still meaningful. But it's nowhere near the gap investors saw on the upgrade day, when the target jumped by $76 in a single note. The more important question is whether the $201 billion market estimate proves too low, too high or merely early.

Frankly, the market-size call is more interesting than the target. Investing.com reported that Raymond James's base case sits near Nvidia's roughly $200 billion long-term framework and below AMD's own $220 billion estimate. That's a useful triangle: the rival, the company and the broker all circling roughly the same pool of AI-linked CPU demand. It doesn't prove AMD gets the profit. It does prove the debate has moved beyond whether server CPUs matter.

Investors betting on AMD now aren't just betting on Nvidia's leftovers. They're betting AMD keeps taking measurable share from Intel in a server market expanding fast enough that both companies can grow while Intel still loses ground. That can happen. But after a 136% run since late March, the next part needs execution, not just a better spreadsheet.

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