U.S. semiconductor equities advanced on Wednesday after Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) provided an upbeat outlook that reinforced investor confidence in sustained spending on AI infrastructure and a growing role for central processing units (CPUs) in the next investment cycle.
AMD leapt nearly 18% in premarket trading and was positioned to reach a record share price if those gains held into regular sessions. Intel shares rose about 6% during the session. Other notable moves included Arm Holdings, which jumped roughly 11%, Qualcomm, up about 4%, Marvell Technology, which gained 1.7%, and Micron Technology, which surged 6.4%.
The market reaction reflected a shift in emphasis within AI compute workloads. Companies increasingly pursuing so-called agentic AI - systems designed to perform autonomous tasks - are broadening demand beyond graphics processing units, or GPUs, historically used to train large AI models. That shift is elevating the importance of CPUs for deploying AI models in production environments.
Late Tuesday, AMD said the industry transition toward "inference," the stage where trained AI models are put to work in real-world applications, is generating new prospects for its server CPUs. The chipmaker raised its outlook for the server CPU addressable market, now expecting it to expand by more than 35% per year through 2030, up from an earlier projection of 18%.
Market analysts noted the evolving narrative around AMD. "AMD story is no longer just about having a GPU pipeline to challenge Nvidia... It’s increasingly about a broader compute opportunity, with CPUs and GPUs both playing a role as AI workloads become more demanding," said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
AMD’s shares have already experienced sizable gains this year, climbing roughly 66%, and the company posted its strongest month in April since the dotcom era, outpacing Nvidia’s gain of about 5% for the same period.
Valuation metrics in the sector also drew attention. AMD trades at about 39.66 times forward earnings, a level well above its five-year average and nearly double Nvidia’s forward multiple of roughly 21 times, despite Nvidia’s larger share of the AI market.
Elsewhere in the market, Samsung Electronics became only the second Asian company to reach a $1 trillion market value mark earlier in the day, a milestone attributed in this session to an AI-fueled rally in its shares.
Super Micro surge and outlook
Super Micro Computer rallied nearly 19% after forecasting fourth-quarter revenue and profit above analyst expectations, offering reassurance to investors concerned about a recent U.S. Justice Department case related to alleged illegal chip shipments to China. The company said demand remained strong for its customizable, high-performance AI servers among data-center operators and startups.
CEO Charles Liang said demand was also strong for its broader data-center and cloud software offerings, while production sites in Taiwan, Malaysia and the Netherlands are ramping up aggressively.
J.P. Morgan analysts attributed the better-than-expected outlook to margin recovery and a more diversified customer base, but they cautioned that corporate governance issues remain a potential overhang for the stock.
Integrated within the wider market commentary was an investor-focused product reference outlining an AI-driven stock-selection tool evaluating Intel alongside thousands of other companies using more than 100 financial metrics. That tool is described as an impartial system identifying stocks that present attractive risk-reward profiles based on current data.
The session’s moves underscored how evolving AI workload patterns - from model training to inference and production deployment - are reshaping demand across different chip architectures and lifting shares of firms positioned to supply both CPUs and GPUs as well as customizable server solutions.