Haitong International analyst Jeff Pu raised his price target on AMD to $640, arguing the chipmaker's upcoming deal with AI company Anthropic could turn out bigger than its existing agreements with Meta and OpenAI, according to a note relayed by chip analyst Jukan. The note expects AMD to unveil Anthropic as its third customer buying chips at gigawatt scale, following Microsoft's rollout of AMD's Helios rack-scale AI servers on July 20. Based on that outlook, Pu lifted his 2026 and 2027 earnings-per-share estimates by 2 percent and 11 percent. He also flagged that AMD is closing the hardware gap with Nvidia, saying its upcoming MI450X chip narrows the distance while the following MI550X, which packs four chip dies and more high-bandwidth memory, could pull ahead. On the server CPU side, strong demand for AMD's Venice chips is expected to push data center CPU prices up 30 to 35 percent year over year in 2027, with an earlier price hike possible in the third quarter of this year. AMD reports earnings on August 4, which Pu expects to be relatively uneventful with revenue guidance already largely priced in by investors. The core message is that AMD's AI customer base is broadening well beyond its early anchor deals.
Why it matters · A third gigawatt-scale AI customer beyond Meta and OpenAI would show AMD's AI chip business is broadening past a handful of anchor deals, which is exactly the kind of demand diversification investors watch for before believing a chip growth story is durable.
Worth asking · If Anthropic really becomes AMD's third gigawatt-scale customer at a bigger scale than Meta or OpenAI, does that mean Nvidia's AI chip dominance is genuinely cracking, or is AMD just picking up the overflow demand Nvidia can't supply fast enough?