Why AMD can beat rivals Intel and Nvidia in the market for data-center CPUs

By Hannah Pedone and Britney Nguyen

AMD's stock rallies after Raymond James turns more bullish given the company's strength in the more than $200 billion market for server CPUs

Shares of AMD rose Tuesday.

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices climbed Tuesday after an analyst upgraded the stock and highlighted the company's strength over competitors in the booming market for server central processing units.

The rise of agentic artificial intelligence and inference has led to a surge in demand for server CPUs, and AMD (AMD) has said it sees the total addressable market for those chips reaching $220 billion by the end of the decade.

Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold said that although his projections are short of AMD's, he thinks the company is well equipped to capture the growing revenue opportunity there - more so than rivals Arm Holdings (ARM), Intel (INTC) and Nvidia (NVDA).

Leopold raised his rating on AMD's stock to a strong buy, from outperform. His $641 price target implies about 34% upside from current levels.

AMD's stock rallied 4.9% on Tuesday, to outpace the overall semiconductor sector's gain of about 1%.

Leopold forecasts overall server-CPU revenue growing at a 44% five-year compound annual growth rate to roughly $201 billion in 2030 - with $33.5 billion of that coming from conventional data centers, and AI-related needs driving the other $168 billion.

AMD "offers the strongest combination of direct earnings leverage, data-center positioning and market-share gains," Leopold wrote in a Tuesday note to clients. He was referring to AMD's ability to translate server-CPU revenue growth into profit as it gains market share.

Leopold said that he had originally modeled for AMD's graphics processing units to take over as the largest portion of its business over server CPUs - "but with the inflection in CPU demand, we have deferred the revenue crossover," he wrote.

While AMD mostly competes with Intel in the market for both server and personal-computer CPUs, Leopold said Intel "remains exposed to share loss," as its x86 architecture faces rising competition from Arm-based server CPUs from Arm and Nvidia. He sees AMD moving past Intel in the server-CPU market next year.

Leopold noted that Arm mostly benefits from rising demand through its business selling royalties and licensing for its chip designs - though its first-ever in-house CPU optimized to support AI workloads could offer an advantage.

Meanwhile, Nvidia introduced Vera, its first-ever standalone CPU, earlier this year, saying it opens the company up to a total addressable market it projects will reach $200 billion by the end of the decade.

Although Vera makes up only a minor portion of Nvidia's overall revenue, "it is growing rapidly and should become increasingly important as CPUs play a larger role in" the deployment of AI applications and the data-center build-out, Leopold said.

See also: 16 beaten-down AI stocks that are beloved by BofA analysts

AMD's stock has soared 123% in 2026, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX has climbed 63% and the S&P 500 index SPX has advanced 12%.

-Hannah Pedone -Britney Nguyen

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08-25-26 1659ET