Summary
AMD faces significant headwinds, including disappointing CES 2025 performance, slowing hyperscaler capex growth, and mega-cap tech companies developing their own chips, impacting AMD's customer base.
AMD's focus on AI CPUs is risky due to low workplace AI adoption and poor performance of Microsoft's AI Co-Pilot, suggesting limited demand for AI PCs.
AMD is losing market share to Nvidia in GPUs due to a lack of backward compatibility in new software, and Broadcom is emerging as a strong competitor in AI chips.
Long-term growth prospects in AI and data centers face headwinds as tech companies produce their custom AI chips instead.
Valuation analysis indicates AMD's fair value is around $96, with technical analysis suggesting a bearish trend, leading to a 'Sell' rating with a $96 price target.
detail of cpu chip processor on aluminum heat sink cooler and lights effects
Brief/Overview
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) is a major multinational technology company that manufactures microprocessors, embedded processors, and graphics processors (GPUs) for servers, workstations, personal computers, etc. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
In 2024, amidst the surge in artificial intelligence-related stocks, AMD underperformed, not only experiencing a decline of 18% in the year but also losing nearly half of its value from its 52-week high of $227 in March 2024, with the share currently trading around $115.
In this report, I will be highlighting major headwinds for the stock, such as the company’s disappointing performance at the CES 2025 event, a risk from a slowdown in hyper-scaler capex growth, and mega-cap tech companies developing and using their own chips instead of being AMD customers.
Thesis/Triggers
CES 2025—All Eyes on AI CPU Products
AMD’s presentation at the highly anticipated CES 2025 event left investors and fans disappointed as it failed to mention or address the buzz topic—the company’s upcoming GPUs—the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070, as well as the RDNA 4 architecture. The company instead focused heavily on artificial intelligence and AI-related next-gen CPU launches, such as the new Ryzen 9950 X3D. Another major announcement was around the Ryzen AI 300 series processors, which is their product line for AI CPUs, especially Co-Pilot+ PCs.
To address the hype around AI CPUs first, I do not believe it is a very good idea for AMD to increase their consumer AI PC portfolio for many reasons. Firstly, there is little adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace. Only 5% of respondents to a Deutsche Bank survey conducted in December 2024 said they extensively used AI tools for work-related tasks. This number has not improved since July 2024. Over a third of respondents still say that they do not use AI tools at all for workplace tasks.
DB Survey on workplace adoption of AI tools
Next up is the disappointing performance of the Microsoft AI Co-Pilot product. The product is so bad that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff did not hesitate to criticize the same in their earnings call in August 2024. Benioff said that the solution had left many customers disappointed. Salesforce launched its Agentforce platform, which will empower customers to build their own bots, or “agents,” to perform tasks autonomously—across Salesforce CRM apps—with some degree of human oversight. While his criticism of Copilot could be attributed to the fact that Agentforce is a rival of Copilot, the average user is unhappy with the latter too, and so are Microsoft employees. As early as March 2024, users complained that Copilot was not as good as ChatGPT. Users as well as employees at Microsoft are unhappy with the new update launched in October 2024, making them question its effectiveness, with issues such as freezing and slower response times and less informative responses. Microsoft’s Copilot app fails to work with the company’s identity and access management platform Entra, prompting the company to advise organizations to uninstall the app. This could further stall adoption of the feature and AI PCs in general.
While those bullish on the stock may argue that an AI-driven PC upgrade/replacement cycle is near, there is little hope for AI PCs in my opinion, as that is what the data seems to indicate. A survey of 26,000 respondents showed that 84% of respondents were not willing to pay up premium prices for AI features on personal computers, 9% were unsure, and only 7% were willing to do so. IDC VP Linn Huang is of the opinion that AI PCs ramping up towards mass market status may only begin in 2026, which suggests it would be slower than mainstream expectations from Gartner and Canalys suggesting the AI PCs could make up nearly 40% of all PC shipments in 2025.
AMD losing out to Nvidia (in GPUs)
Talking now about the GPUs—the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. AMD has confirmed that FSR 4 (Fidelity Super Resolution) will be exclusive to the new RDNA 4 GPUs, which reduces the potential for selling the other chips. While this may promote exclusivity and increase demand for the new chips, it is unclear why the company would do so knowing full well it would make them less competitive to Nvidia (NVDA), which has announced that it will make its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 4 backward compatible to older hardware, i.e., all existing RTX GPUs. While AMD has shifted to more mid-range GPUs, the lack of backward compatibility of new software (the FSR) to older hardware (previous generation RDNA GPUs) negatively impacts how gamers view the company’s products, especially in comparison to Nvidia.
AMD Vs NVDA Market Share in GPUs
The above graph shows the discrete market distribution of Nvidia and AMD in the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) segment. One can see how over time, Nvidia, with its superior technology (and implementation), has chewed into the share of AMD.
As for the AI chips, AMD launched the MI325X in October 2024 to rival Nvidia’s Blackwell H200 Tensor Core GPUs. AMD claims these new chips have better performance than Nvidia’s H200 on memory capacity, bandwidth, and other features. However, Nvidia’s chips use their specialised programming language—CUDA, which has become standard among AI developers and entrenched in the AI ecosystem, which establishes Nvidia’s moat and protects its market share from competitors such as AMD. Additionally, the continuous R&D across both companies means we never know when Nvidia may come up with a product that can rival even the improved AMD MI355X, which is set to launch in H2 2025.
AMD MI325X Vs Nvidia H200
AMD losing out to Broadcom and Tech companies as #2
So far, we’ve covered how AMD’s bet on AI Copilot PCs may fail and how the company is losing ground to Nvidia. In this section, I will be talking about how AMD may have also failed to be the closest competitor to Nvidia in offering AI solutions to mega-cap tech companies such as Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN). The closest rivals to Nvidia may be Broadcom (AVGO), Arm Technologies (ARM) or all these tech companies themselves as they begin developing their customized artificial intelligence chips.
Starting off with the largest of all these companies—Apple. The iPhone maker has, at several different points, or is currently, using AI chips from multiple companies such as Amazon, Broadcom, and Google to train its AI models for various features of Apple Intelligence across various devices in the Apple ecosystem. Apple’s senior director of ML and AI confirmed the company was using Amazon’s Graviton chips, which led to a 40% efficiency improvement. This shows that Amazon’s chips aren’t just useful for inferencing from AI models but also developing new models, thereby reducing the reliance on traditional chip makers such as AMD. In November 2024, Microsoft launched two additional AI infrastructure chips to increase the speed of AI operations and increase data security. Furthermore, companies are looking to Broadcom (AVGO) and not AMD for their custom AI chip solutions. Broadcom is being sought after extensively by multiple tech companies for their large-scale AI developments.
All these factors would suggest there is significant downside risk for AMD’s estimates of 26% revenue growth in 2025, as well as future revenue growth projections of over 20% CAGR.
Valuation – Median-Multiple and Technical Analysis
In order to arrive at a price target for AMD, I will be using two methodologies: the median multiple of comparable companies in order to estimate the fair value and some degree of technical analysis to gauge where the price is headed in the near future (6 to 12 months).
First up, the median-multiple analysis uses various valuation multiples: enterprise value EV/sales, EV/EBITDA, EV/EBIT, price/sales, price/earnings, price-to-operating cash flow, and lastly, the price to unlevered free cash flow. The comparable companies considered for AMD are Arm Holdings (ARM), Broadcom (AVGO), Micron Technology (MU), Nvidia (NVDA), Qualcomm (QCOM), and Texas Instruments (TXN).
AMD Median Multiple Valuation
While each valuation multiple produces different fair value estimates, I have considered the median of these various fair value estimates in order to arrive at a price target of AMD. As highlighted in the above Excel sheet, the median fair value estimate for AMD is roughly $99. For full disclosure, the average of these seven fair value estimates was approximately $121 (near close on 15th January 2025). I have chosen the median estimate to avoid the fair value estimate being impacted by extreme values (which were created by the EV/EBIT as well as both sales measures—P/S and EV/S).
This tells us the fair value of AMD may be between $99 and $121. Let us look at what the price action tells us. Below is the monthly chart of AMD with trendlines joining the closing highs of November 2021 and February 2024. The red trendline indicates support (buying) the lows of September 2015, February 2016, October 2022, December 2022, and July 2024. The orange trendline joins the lows of March 2018, October 2022, and December 2022. The monthly closing charts show AMD breaking down below both the red and orange trendlines, a significant bearish development. This suggests that price may be headed lower over the coming few months. The most likely destination, i.e., the next support level, comes at the $94.69 horizontal support line, which has candlestick contact points at the highs of August 2020, November 2020, December 2020, July 2022, and March 2023 and the lows of September 2021, April 2023, and October 2023.
AMD bearish breakdown below trendlines
Conclusion
Based on the headwinds that AMD faces, even in light of tailwinds for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, mainly competition from Nvidia and Broadcom in the GPU and AI chips market, as well as underperformance and limited demand for Copilot AI PCs and tech companies manufacturing their own AI chips, it seems that AMD’s price may be headed lower in the next 6-12 months.
My price target, based on the median of fair value estimates as well as evidence from technical analysis, is $99, which is about 20% below the closing of 15th January 2025, and thereby I place a ‘Sell’ rating on the stock.
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