New York, January 17, 2026, 17:46 EST — Market closed.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc shares ended Friday up about 1.7% at $231.83, after trading between $228.95 and $235.71, with about 42.5 million shares changing hands. The move left AMD not far below its 52-week high of $240.34.
Why it matters now: the market is treating power and data-center space as a new bottleneck for AI computing, not just chips. AMD sells data-center processors and is pushing deeper into AI accelerators, so any signal about infrastructure demand tends to spill into the stock.
It also lands at an awkward moment — a long weekend, then a restart into the thick of earnings season. Investors are looking for clean reads on whether AI spending is holding up, and whether the rally in chip names can survive normal January chop.
Riot Platforms said on Friday it signed a 10-year data center lease and services agreement with AMD at its Rockdale, Texas site, starting with 25 megawatts of “critical IT load” — the power used to run servers — delivered in phases from January to May. Riot said the initial term is expected to generate about $311 million in contract revenue, and extensions and expansion options could lift that to about $1 billion and as much as 200 MW. “Advancing high-performance computing and AI requires partners that can match our pace and scale,” AMD CIO Hasmukh Ranjan said, while Riot CEO Jason Les called the deal a “validation” of its infrastructure and power availability. 1
A Form 144 filing dated Jan. 16 showed Ava Hahn, listed as an AMD officer, planned to sell 2,442 shares valued at about $572,454 through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Form 144 is a notice of a proposed sale under SEC Rule 144, often tied to restricted stock, and it does not guarantee a sale happens. The filing said the trading plan relied on Rule 10b5-1 — a pre-arranged program — adopted on June 2, 2025. 2
Wall Street ended little changed on Friday before the long weekend, and an index of semiconductors gained 1.2%, Reuters reported. The stock market is shut on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and earnings season is set to pick up next week with reports from Netflix, Johnson & Johnson and Intel. “Most investors will take that as a win,” Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial, said of the market holding near the 7,000 mark on the S&P 500. 3
But traders are bracing for bigger swings once Friday’s monthly options expiration clears, with volatility gauges sitting near one-year lows, options market experts told Reuters. “I think this options expiration will allow the S&P 500 to start moving around a bit more,” said Brent Kochuba, founder of options analytics service SpotGamma. The same story flagged a list of near-term volatility catalysts including a potential Supreme Court tariff decision, a January Federal Reserve meeting and developments in a Justice Department investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. 4
For AMD, the Riot lease is not a product launch or a chip order, but it underlines a simple point: AI demand is turning into a physical buildout, and the winners need access to the racks and the electricity. Nvidia still dominates AI accelerators, and Intel remains the main rival in server CPUs.
When trading resumes Tuesday, investors will be watching whether the chip group keeps leading, or whether the tape fades back into defensive positioning after the holiday. AMD can drift with the sector for days, then gap on a headline — that is the setup right now.
The next company-specific marker is Feb. 3, when AMD is scheduled to report fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results after the close and host a conference call at 5 p.m. EST, according to its investor relations calendar. 5
