Nutanix's stock soars as AMD investment creates a 'halo effect'

By Emily Bary

The company, which makes hyperconverged infrastructure including storage offerings, is partnering with AMD and betting that AI customers want flexible ecosystems

Nutanix's stock has struggled over the past year.

The web of artificial-intelligence investments is only getting more complex.

Just two days after Meta Platforms (META) struck a deal that gave it performance-based stock warrants for up to 10% of Advanced Micro Devices shares (AMD), AMD announced it will be making an investment of its own.

The chip maker has a new partnership with Nutanix (NTNX) through which the companies will "jointly develop an open, full-stack AI infrastructure platform designed to power agentic AI applications." AMD will also invest $150 million in Nutanix by purchasing shares at $36.26 apiece, according to Wednesday's statement, and it will dole out up to $100 million more for joint engineering and sales efforts.

See more: AMD's Meta deal serves as major validation point for investors

The equity investment is expected to close during the second quarter, but Nutanix investors are celebrating already. Shares of the company, which makes hyperconverged infrastructure that brings together things like storage, database services and enterprise artificial-intelligence offerings, rose 19% in Wednesday's extended session.

"The ultimate outcome from the partnership is unclear, but it has a halo effect," Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold wrote, in light of the stock move. The new deal overshadowed a weak outlook, which partly reflected the pressure Nutanix faces from higher memory costs.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said on the company's earnings call that the new business relationship "expands our opportunity in the enterprise AI market."

Leopold, for his part, said the collaboration seemed "intriguing," though he and his team "have not determined now it will alter Nutanix's business."

Nutanix had a market capitalization just north of $10 billion as of the close of Wednesday's regular trading. Shares have fallen 43% in the past 12 months.

"Through our partnership with Nutanix, we're building a scalable, full-stack AI platform rooted in openness, designed to give enterprises and service providers the flexibility to innovate, extend and grow AI deployments," Dan McNamara, an AMD senior vice president who's also the general manager of its compute and enterprise AI initiatives, said in a statement.

Don't miss: Nvidia's blowout earnings guidance is met with a shrug. Here's what to know.

The move seems to be a bet on the idea that businesses want flexibility in terms of what they use when conducting AI workloads.

In the statement, the companies said that customers increasingly want to build AI in environments that foster "open standards, interoperable software frameworks and architectural choice."

The platform they plan to build together will merge Nutanix's cloud and Kubernetes open-source platforms with AMD's Epyc central processing units and Instinct graphics processing units. It will also make use of AMD's ROCm software, an open-source offering.

-Emily Bary

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

02-25-26 2239ET