While Advanced Micro Devices Inc. shares didn’t savor a Wednesday bump during the company’s artificial-intelligence event, they were rallying sharply Thursday as analysts reflected on the chip maker’s presentation.
Chief Executive Lisa Su and her team “put together one of the most impressive new product event/launches by our reckoning in the last decade, perhaps ever,” Rosenblatt Securities analyst Hans Mosesmann wrote in a note to clients.
The launch of AMD’s
AMD,
MI300X AI/graphics-processing-unit accelerator “was not just a speeds and feeds geek fest (it was that for sure, with AMD claiming superiority in AI inferencing), but an industry movement coalescing around the concept of ‘open’ sourced technologies are preferred (demanded really), to address the insanely fast/accelerating life-changing thing that AI has become,” Mosesmann continued.
Opinion: AMD’s new products represent the first real threat to Nvidia’s AI dominance
He was also impressed by the company’s talk of its software platform ROCm, which he thinks is catching up to Nvidia Corp.’s
NVDA,
CUDA.
“Of course, Nvidia is not going away, and we are quite sure will remain the dominant AI player for years to come but AMD we feel made the case yesterday that they will be an important AI innovator on a secular basis,” Mosesmann noted, as he kept his outperform rating and $200 target price on the stock.
AMD shares were up 6% in Thursday morning trading.
Baird’s Tristan Gerra was also impressed.
“Rapidly unfolding hyperscaler engagements, highly competitive AI architecture specs, along with accelerated new product roadmap, bode well for share gains and continued acceleration in AI-related revenue for AMD beyond 2024, while faster-than-expected rate of adoption so far could potentially drive upside in the AI revenue outlook for 2024, in our view,” he wrote.
Gerra also sees the potential for “high-volume deployments,” thanks to the “significant software milestones” AMD is showing. He rates the stock at outperform with a $125 target price.
TD Cowen’s Matthew Ramsay said that AMD’s event reinforced his belief that the company “is well positioned to meaningfully take part” in the large total addressable market for AI accelerators.
The company called out Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
and Oracle Corp.
ORCL,
as customers, announcements that were “strong” but not “surprising,” in Ramsay’s view.
“We remain encouraged that AMD is making an impressive case (and is getting customer maintain) to supply adaptive computing solutions for both training and inference in increasingly large [generative-AI] infrastructure builds,” he wrote. “We believe this signifies a strong AI strategy of delivering a broad portfolio of [central processing unit], GPU, and [field-programmable gate array] assets, with open software that enables easily deployed AI workloads while leveraging the company’s existing partnerships to speed up its AI ramps at-scale.”
Ramsay has an outperform rating and $130 target price on AMD shares.
