Raymond James upgrades AMD to Strong Buy, sees path to challenging Intel’s CPU dominance

Raymond James just handed AMD its strongest endorsement yet, upgrading the chipmaker to Strong Buy and slapping a $641 price target on the stock. Analyst Simon Leopold’s rationale boils down to a simple thesis: the server CPU market is about to get a lot bigger, and AMD is positioned to take a disproportionate share of it.

The upgrade, issued on August 25, came with a price target bump from $565, representing a roughly 13% increase. Meanwhile, Intel sits with a Market Perform rating from the same firm, which is Wall Street’s polite way of saying “we’re not excited.”

The numbers behind the call

AMD’s x86 client CPU market share climbed to 30.3% in Q2 2026, up from 23.9% just one year earlier. That’s a 6.4 percentage point swing in twelve months.

Intel still holds 69.7% of the x86 client CPU market.

On the server side, AMD has projected server CPU revenue growth of over 70% year-over-year for Q2 2026, with expectations for that pace to carry into 2027. The company has revised its long-term server CPU growth outlook from 18% annual growth to upwards of 35%, now targeting a total addressable market exceeding $120 billion by 2030.

For context, the broader server CPU market is projected to reach approximately $201 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 44%.

Agentic AI changes the CPU calculus

The catalyst behind these projections isn’t just general cloud expansion. It’s a specific architectural shift driven by agentic AI workloads, the kind of AI systems that operate autonomously, make decisions, and execute multi-step tasks without human intervention.

These workloads are changing the math on how data centers allocate resources. Agentic AI requires a more balanced approach between CPU and GPU resources, pushing the CPU-to-GPU ratio toward 1:1 in certain deployments.

Intel’s challenges create AMD’s opportunity

Raymond James maintained its Market Perform rating on Intel, citing execution risks and foundry constraints.

AMD, by contrast, operates on a fabless model, relying on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to produce its chips. Server chips carry higher margins and larger average selling prices than consumer processors, meaning every percentage point of server market share AMD captures from Intel translates into outsized revenue and profit gains.

What investors should watch

The key risk to this thesis is execution. AMD’s projections assume it can sustain 70%-plus server CPU revenue growth and continue gaining market share. If data center spending slows, or if Intel’s turnaround gains traction faster than expected, those growth assumptions could prove optimistic.

There’s also the question of whether the agentic AI demand thesis plays out as aggressively as forecast. A 44% CAGR for the server CPU market through 2030 assumes that agentic AI deployments scale rapidly and that the CPU-intensive nature of these workloads persists as architectures evolve.