Kindig said AMD is now entering a new phase as it seeks to expand its position in the AI accelerator market dominated by Nvidia.
- Kindig pointed to AMD’s expanding CPU business, upcoming GPU products and growing list of AI customers as key developments to watch.
- In her “Dark Horse” thesis six years ago, Kindig highlighted the company as an underdog with just about 4% of the data-center CPU market, competing against Intel’s near-monopoly.
- Kindig’s thesis centered on AMD’s Zen architecture and the company’s ability to steadily take CPU share from Intel.
AMD’s rise to a $1 trillion market capitalization has put the chipmaker’s next phase of growth under the spotlight, with I/O Fund Lead Tech Analyst Beth Kindig arguing that the company’s AI opportunity could still be significantly underestimated.
Kindig, calling AMD the “Dark Horse,” said the company is now entering a new phase as it seeks to expand its position in the AI accelerator market dominated by Nvidia Corp. (NVDA).
“AMD is no longer the deeply underestimated company it was a decade ago,” Kindig said, while arguing that the next chapter could be just as consequential.
She pointed to AMD’s expanding CPU business, upcoming GPU products and growing list of AI customers as key developments to watch as the company attempts to gain meaningful share in the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure market.
AMD shares closed 0.2% higher in Friday’s regular trading session, and inched up 0.1% during the after-hours session. AMD’s market cap topped $1 trillion for the first time last week.
Kindig Says AMD’s ‘Dark Horse’ Story Is Entering A New Chapter
In her “Dark Horse” thesis six years ago, Kindig highlighted the company as an underdog with just about 4% of the data-center CPU market, competing against Intel Corp.’s (INTC) near-monopoly.
Her thesis centered on AMD’s Zen architecture and the company’s ability to steadily take CPU share from Intel.
Now, she sees a similar setup in GPUs, even though Nvidia’s lead is substantially larger this time around. However, Kindig noted that AMD does not need to overtake Nvidia to make significant gains. She said moving from the mid-single digits toward 15%-20% GPU market share would amount to roughly a two to four times increase from AMD’s current position.
Venice, Helios Put AMD’s AI Ambitions To Test
The next phase of Kindig’s thesis rests on AMD’s ability to expand both its CPU business and its position in AI accelerators.
On the CPU side, AMD says demand for its upcoming Venice EPYC generation is stronger than for any previous EPYC generation. Built on Zen 6 and a 2nm process, Venice is expected to improve performance per watt while higher core counts could also support higher average selling prices.
“Customer demand for Venice is stronger than for any prior EPYC generation, and we expect to continue growing market share across cloud and enterprise in the coming quarters,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su during the company’s second-quarter earnings call with analysts in August.
But Kindig sees the bigger potential shift coming from GPUs. AMD’s Helios platform combines Venice CPUs, MI450 GPUs, Pensando networking and ROCm software, positioning the company to compete for a larger share of AI infrastructure spending.
Su added during the call that she expects AMD’s data-center business to grow by more than 100% in 2027, driven by a sharp increase in AI-related demand.
“The Helios ramp is just starting at the end of Q3 and it’ll be much more substantial in Q4,” she added.
Kindig argued that the opportunity for AMD is not simply about matching Nvidia on raw performance. She added that hyperscalers are increasingly focused on the economics of AI inference, including how many tokens they can generate for every dollar and watt spent.
BofA Raises AMD Stock Price Target
According to TheFly, BofA raised its price target on AMD to $720 from $620 while maintaining a ‘Buy’ rating in a note on Friday, implying an upside potential of over 14% from current levels. The firm pointed to the growing importance of CPUs as AI workloads become more agentic as one of the reasons for its bullish outlook.
BofA said the recent Anthropic-Akamai CPU infrastructure deal “further supports CPU importance in the agentic era,” arguing that agentic AI requires compute across the broader system rather than GPUs alone.
BofA now models AMD’s server CPU total addressable market growing from $61 billion in calendar 2026 to $211 billion by 2030.
What Retail Investors Think Of AMD Stock
Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around AMD trended in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory at the time of writing.
One user believes that while both AMD and Nvidia are “good,” they think that there is “way more upside at the moment” for AMD.
https://stocktwits.com/SustainableSpidey/message/665191641
AMD stock has gained 194% year-to-date and 291% over the past 12 months. The Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) is up 25% over the past 12 months, while the iShares U.S. Technology ETF (IYW) is up 38%.
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