Up 3x, Has AMD Cracked The Nvidia Code?

For most of the AI boom, Nvidia (NVDA) has been the only name that mattered in data center hardware. That dynamic is shifting. AMD (AMD) stock has risen 55% year-to-date and remains up 3.5x over the last 12 months, powered by record data center revenues and an increasingly competitive GPU lineup.

With hyperscalers actively seeking alternatives to single-vendor dependence, the structural case for AMD is stronger than the tenfold gap in market capitalization might suggest. Investors now see a credible second player in the AI gold rush – and the data backs it up. Data center revenue hit a record $5.4 billion over the last quarter, up 39% year-over-year, and strong Q1 guidance of $9.8 billion confirmed AMD as one of the key beneficiaries of the estimated $160 billion plus in hyperscaler capex for the quarter.

In fact, the company now expects data center revenue to improve by 60% year-over-year over a multi-year period.

Is This Structural Or Cyclical?

This appears like a structural gain.

AMD is successfully executing a two-front war: taking server CPU share from Intel while ramping its Instinct GPUs as a viable alternative to Nvidia. The GPU growth is particularly interesting

The hardware case for AMD is strong. Its Instinct MI325X offers up to 432GB of HBM4 memory – nearly double Nvidia’s latest Rubin architecture. For inference workloads running massive models like Llama-4, that means fitting the entire model on a…