Two major semiconductor stocks, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA), are drawing bullish analyst upgrades ahead of their earnings, with price targets soaring on expectations of sustained AI-driven demand. While AMD stock traded lower on Tuesday, the broad analyst sentiment signals strong conviction in the companies’ roles as infrastructure backbones for artificial intelligence.
Evercore ISI raised its AMD price target to $579 from $358, maintaining an Outperform rating after Q1 AI channel checks indicated a pivotal shift: AI workloads are projected to move from training to inference by late 2026. This transition, Evercore noted, pushes hyperscalers to scrutinize cost-per-token and total cost of ownership, opening doors for alternative accelerators like AMD’s. The firm also highlighted AMD’s server CPU momentum — a 220-basis-point quarterly gain in unit share to an estimated 24% — and projected the total addressable market could jump from 30 million to as much as 110 million annual units.
Citi contributed to the optimism, raising AMD’s target from $358 to $460 while keeping a Neutral rating. Analyst Atif Malik pointed to a “CPU renaissance” driven by agentic AI workloads, forecasting the server CPU market could reach $132 billion by 2030. Citi also reported industry chatter that AMD may have landed Anthropic as a customer for its next-gen MI450 AI accelerators, with a potential announcement at AMD’s July AI event. AMD’s CEO Lisa Su separately met with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in Shanghai, fueling expectations that Washington might ease some AI chip export restrictions on China, a market that accounts for roughly a quarter of AMD’s revenue.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is seeing parallel enthusiasm ahead of its fiscal Q1 2027 earnings on May 20. Truist Securities reiterated a Buy rating and $287 target, calling Nvidia’s CUDA platform an operating system for AI. HSBC was even more aggressive, raising its target to $325 from $295 and projecting Q1 revenue of $81.1 billion — 4% above Nvidia’s guidance — and Q2 revenue of $91.1 billion, well above the $85.6 billion consensus. HSBC also lifted its FY2028 EPS estimate by 27% to $13.01, citing a surge in datacenter revenue expectations to $528 billion. Other firms including BofA ($320), Cantor Fitzgerald ($350), and Evercore ISI ($352) also maintained bullish ratings, though HSBC did caution that Nvidia’s stock has underperformed the SOX index recently and that future catalysts may need to come from new areas like agentic AI server CPUs and optics deals.
For the crypto market, the AI hardware boom is a neutral signal. Neither AMD nor Nvidia directly affect blockchain networks, but their chips power the high-performance computing that underpins both AI and certain crypto mining operations. The sustained capex flow into datacenter infrastructure can reinforce confidence in the wider tech sector, yet the immediate price action in Bitcoin or altcoins remains disconnected from these analyst upgrades.
