AMD stock surges 10%. Here's what sparked the rally

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) surged nearly 10% by midday Monday, adding more than $20 billion to its market cap and marking one of its biggest single-day jumps in over a year — thanks to well-timed AI hype. Days earlier, AMD gave Wall Street a detailed product roadmap, some actual hardware, and a few well-placed clues about who’s buying its tech.

At its “Advancing AI” event in San Jose, California, AMD made it clear that it’s going after Nvidia. CEO Lisa Su rolled out the company’s next-gen Instinct MI350 accelerator chips and teased its coming “Helios” AI rack — an in-house server platform built to showcase AMD’s MI400 GPUs, which are due out in 2026. Su said Helios “will set a new benchmark for AI scalability.”

AMD is also pivoting away from Nvidia’s closed-link architecture. Su said on Thursday, “The future of AI is not going to be built by any one company or in a closed ecosystem. It's going to be shaped by open collaboration across the industry.”

The news out of California told Wall Street two things: AMD is closing its gap with Nvidia, and the company’s customers are real.

One of those customers is OpenAI, which AMD confirmed is planning to use its next-gen chips and Helios platform. CEO Sam Altman spoke on stage with Su, remarking that initial specs for the MI400 were so ambitious he thought, “No way.” And major names such as Meta, Oracle, and xAI are already testing or deploying MI300X successors and supporting AMD’s modular approach. AI cloud provider Crusoe told Reuters that it’s planning to buy $400 million of AMD’s new chips.

While Nvidia still dominates the AI training market, the recent news signals that AMD is carving out a credible second-place lane in the AI arms race — and that partners aren’t waiting to place orders.

Wall Street liked what it saw. 

Piper Sandler upgraded AMD to “Overweight” status and boosted its price target to $140 (from $125). Analyst Harsh Kumar said in a note that AMD is expected to see “a snapback” in the fourth quarter as it works through most of its China-related charges and sees some of its product announcements as key to scale the company’s AI infrastructure.

“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD instinct growth,” he wrote. “We also note that the largest of the business units, namely client, is starting to see some pull-ins.”

AMD is signaling it wants to be the “other” full-stack AI company. It has quietly acquired a string of startups — Eno, Brium, Untether AI — to build a more vertically integrated AI portfolio. AMD’s moves come at a critical time for the company, which has watched rival Nvidia’s stock rocket over 150% in the past year. While AMD’s stock performance has lagged, its fundamentals have been quietly improving — especially in data center sales — and its ability to show tangible AI progress just gave investors a fresh reason to believe.