AMD has already had one of the best years of any major stock in the market, and Wall Street still thinks there’s more room to run.
Bank of America just gave the chipmaker another vote of confidence. The reasoning has less to do with graphics chips than most investors might expect.
The company posted record second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion, up 50% year over year. CFO Jean Hu credited broad-based strength in the data center business for the results. AMD has already crossed into rarefied territory, joining the trillion-dollar club for the first time.
Inside Bank of America’s new $720 price target
Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya raised his AMD price target to $720 from $620 on Sept. 24, keeping his Buy rating in place, Benzinga reported.
The timing was notable. Arya’s note pointed directly to a fresh CPU infrastructure agreement between Akamai and Anthropic disclosed the same day. The deal is worth $11.6 billion over seven years. It is evidence that traditional server processors remain essential, even as AI accelerator spending grabs most of the headlines.
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Arya backed that view with a specific market forecast. He estimates the server CPU total addressable market will grow from $61 billion in 2026 to $211 billion by 2030, an increase of roughly 246% over four years, Benzinga reported.
AMD’s valuation reflects how much optimism is already baked in. Shares currently trade at 57 times next-12-months earnings, well above Nvidia’s 19 times. Even Intel’s 73 times multiple trails AMD’s. Investors are pricing AMD as a growth story, not a value play.
Why the Akamai-Anthropic deal is critical
The Akamai agreement is technically a CPU infrastructure contract between Akamai and Anthropic rather than a direct AMD order, since Akamai has not named a chip supplier for the workloads involved, Stocktwits reported.
Even so, the deal reinforces a relationship AMD has been building with Anthropic for months. The two companies unveiled a strategic partnership on July 22. It involves up to 2 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct MI450 accelerators, paired with EPYC Venice CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software inside AMD’s Helios rack-scale systems.
AMD did not just sell chips to Anthropic. It committed to invest up to $5 billion in the company, with deployment targets attached. A customer became a portfolio bet.
AMD’s customer list has kept expanding well beyond Anthropic alone. Meta separately agreed to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs. It also became a lead customer for AMD’s next-generation EPYC server chips.
That pushes AMD’s total announced GPU deployment commitments across Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI to roughly 14 gigawatts.
AMD’s historic run to a trillion dollars
The stock’s performance this year has been extraordinary. AMD shares have more than tripled from where they started in 2026. That run has taken the company from a major Nvidia competitor to a trillion-dollar company in its own right.
AMD officially crossed $1 trillion in market value on Sept. 21, during a broad chip rally that sent shares surging roughly 10%, as reported by TheStreet.
The scale of that climb stands out, even against AMD’s own history. On Oct. 8, 2014, when Lisa Su became CEO, AMD shares closed at $3.28. The stock has delivered an extraordinary return for anyone who held on through the past decade.
CFO Jean Hu said at the Citi Global TMT Conference on Sept. 9 that the total addressable market for AI chips could reach $2 trillion to $3 trillion by 2030. Inference workloads, not just model training, will drive most of that expansion, 24/7 Wall St reported.
What it means for AMD investors
BofA’s $720 is not the most aggressive number on the Street. The consensus rating sits at Strong Buy. Price targets go as high as $1,250, which would be nearly double the current price. Arya’s call is bullish. It is also among the more conservative ones, Barchart reported.
Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers has kept his price target at $615, even after the Anthropic partnership was confirmed. He noted the deal had already been widely expected before it was formally announced, according to TheStreet.
Wall Street increasingly views AMD as a complete AI systems provider — GPUs, EPYC CPUs, and rack-scale networking together — rather than a stand-alone chip designer.
That shift also showed up earlier this year when AMD announced up to £2 billion in U.K. investments over five years, spanning computing infrastructure, workforce training, and research partnerships.
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