Advanced Micro Devices shares rose roughly 2.7% on Thursday after Bank of America raised its long-term forecast for the server CPU market, arguing that agentic AI is expanding the role of central processing units in data centers. The brokerage now expects the 2030 server CPU total addressable market to exceed $210 billion, up from about $170 billion previously. BofA said the revised estimate implies nearly 5x growth from the roughly $35 billion level in calendar 2025, with the market expanding at a 36% compound annual growth rate through 2030 versus 30% before.
Analyst Vivek Arya said the emergence of AI agents is changing the CPU-to-GPU ratio from approximately 1:4 during AI training to about 1:1 for agentic AI, “as CPUs become the orchestration control plane.” BofA now sees CPUs accounting for about 10% of the $2.2 trillion data center systems market by 2030, compared with roughly 7% during the AI training era. The firm called AMD its preferred CPU investment because of the company’s dual leadership in processor frequency and core count, while Nvidia remained its top overall semiconductor pick.
Morningstar maintained a $530 fair value estimate on AMD, noting revenue rose 50% year over year and server CPU revenue increased 75%. The research firm expects AMD to begin shipping its Helios AI rack solution in the fourth quarter and projects server CPU revenue growth of about 70% in 2027. Separately, AMD launched a bond offering that could raise $4 billion to $5 billion in what may be its largest investment-grade debt sale. The senior unsecured notes are split into four tranches maturing in 2029, 2031, 2033, and 2036, with initial spreads of 70, 90, 100, and 115 basis points over U.S. Treasuries. Proceeds will go toward general corporate purposes, including possible debt repayment, and the company has $875 million in bonds maturing next month. The capital raise follows AMD’s AI deals with Anthropic and Microsoft, including a commitment to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
