AMD Stock Pops After Buy Upgrade. It's More Than a CPU Play

Advanced Micro Devices stock has had a stellar run on excitement about its central-processing units. But investors should also be looking at its graphics-processing unit potential, according to Citi analysts.

AMD stock was upgraded to Buy from Neutral with a price target of $575, up from $460, by Citi analyst Atif Malik in a research note on Friday.

The shares were up 4% at $509.5 in morning trading on Friday. The stock has more than doubled this year so far as the market becomes increasingly excited about the growth of its CPUs for running artificial-intelligence models.

However, Malik's optimism is bolstered by a focus on AMD's GPU sales, where the company is aiming to rival market leader Nvidia.

Malik argued that investors currently view AMD as a CPU stock and are only pricing in a roughly 60% probability of AMD achieving more than $50 billion in GPU sales by 2028. That's an underestimate of how many GPUs AMD can sell to big customers, especially social-media company Meta Platforms, in the Citi analyst's view.

"We now see AMD emerging as a legit second source in the GPU market with [the] company poised to win lion's share at Meta," Malik wrote.

Chip stocks are getting plenty of love on Wall Street at the moment. BofA Securities double-upgraded Intel to Buy from Underperform with a $135 price target, up from $96, on Thursday, citing strong server CPU sales.