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 ...