AMD Climbs 6% on Analyst Upgrade, New AI Chip and PsiQuantum Pact

AMD shares were up about 6% by Thursday afternoon, building on a 23% run through Wednesday's close. The stock started the day at just 1.9%, then kept climbing as a stack of announcements and an analyst upgrade landed in the same session.

The backdrop is Nvidia. CEO Jensen Huang resigned, and Nvidia stock dropped about 5% — enough to dent the prior session's tech rally. Broadcom moved the other way, gaining about 6% and sitting up 18% this week through Wednesday.

William Blair's Sebastien Naji upgraded AMD to Outperform, moving off Market Perform. He pointed to Nvidia's leadership problems and Intel's supply challenges as the setup.

AMD rolled out the Instinct MI450X, a new member of its MI400 Series for data center and AI workloads carrying 288 GB of HBM4 memory. The chip matches the MI455X on core compute, memory bandwidth, and scale-up and scale-out connectivity — the only real gap is memory capacity. AMD said customers asked for an AI GPU with less HBM4, making the MI450X the cheaper pick for buyers who don't need the extra headroom, and Andrew Dieckmann, who runs AMD's Data Center GPU business, said the series delivers what he called leadership performance plus more options for customers.

Anthropic says its Claude Mythos model got Claude running prompts on AMD's MI355X GPUs in roughly three days with almost no human help — work that used to take dozens of engineers six to 12 months. Claude wrote or adapted nearly all the specialized GPU code to make it run. AMD also put fresh numbers on the MI455X: 21,333 tokens per second per GPU on DeepSeek-R1 in an MLPerf Inference Offline setup, which AMD says is 30% more throughput than the latest data from Nvidia's Vera Rubin.

AMD also expanded its partnership with PsiQuantum to build hardware for quantum computing, and will make an equity investment in the company. Bank of America's Vivek Arya raised his AMD price target to $700, up from $650, keeping a Buy rating and citing the strength of the CPU business — about 21% upside from Thursday's levels. The Wall Street consensus is Strong Buy on 29 Buy and three Hold ratings over the past three months, with an average price target of $652.18, implying roughly 13% upside. Pepperstone's Chris Weston said the market is separating a problem for Nvidia from a problem for AI, and that the price action shows investors see this as a risk specific to Nvidia.