New York, May 22, 2026, 13:04 (EDT)
- AMD shares rose 4.9% to $471.48 in midday Nasdaq trading.
- CEO Lisa Su said the global CPU market is “tight” as AI demand runs ahead of forecasts.
- AMD’s latest push includes more than $10 billion in Taiwan ecosystem investments and a new 2-nanometer EPYC server chip ramp.
Advanced Micro Devices shares rose on Friday after CEO Lisa Su said stronger-than-expected demand was squeezing the global market for central processing units, adding fresh support to a rally that has made the chipmaker one of Wall Street’s closely watched AI trades.
AMD was up 4.9% at $471.48 at 1:04 p.m. EDT, after touching $481.41 earlier in the session, according to StockAnalysis data. The shares closed at $449.59 on Thursday.
The move matters now because investors are trying to decide whether demand for artificial intelligence computing is still broadening, or whether the trade has become too crowded. CPUs, the main processors that run servers and coordinate work across data centers, are getting more attention as AI systems move from training models to “inference,” the use of trained models in real applications.
Speaking in Taipei, Su said AMD was working with partners in Taiwan to ramp capacity after meeting major customers in China and globally. “The overall CPU market has had significantly higher demand than any of us predicted a year ago,” she said. “I would say the CPU market is tight.” Reuters
Su said AMD expected supply to rise every quarter this year, with “significantly more” capacity planned for 2027 and beyond. She said demand was being driven by AI inferencing and agentic AI, a term used for systems that can carry out tasks with more autonomy. Reuters
The company on Thursday said it would invest more than $10 billion across Taiwan’s AI ecosystem to expand advanced packaging and manufacturing capacity for next-generation AI infrastructure. Advanced packaging is the process of combining several chip components so they work as one system, a step that has become a bottleneck for high-end AI and data-center processors.
“As AI adoption accelerates, our global customers are rapidly scaling AI infrastructure to meet growing compute demand,” Su said in AMD’s announcement. The company said its Helios rack-scale platform, using AMD Instinct MI450X GPUs and 6th Gen EPYC CPUs, remained on track for multi-gigawatt deployments beginning in the second half of 2026. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
AMD also said its next-generation EPYC processor, code-named “Venice,” had begun ramping production in Taiwan on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s advanced 2-nanometer process, with future plans to ramp production at TSMC’s Arizona fabrication site. AMD called Venice the first high-performance computing product to enter production on TSMC’s 2-nanometer technology. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
The competitive read-through is direct. Reuters reported that investors and analysts see AMD as a leading challenger to Nvidia in AI chips, while Intel remains a key rival in server CPUs. Nvidia still dominates AI accelerators, or chips designed to speed up AI workloads, but AMD’s pitch is that CPUs, GPUs and networking need to be sold together as larger data-center systems.
Supply is also becoming part of the story. Amkor Technology said on Thursday it is working with AMD on packaging AMD’s chips, and Amkor CEO Kevin Engel told Reuters: “We’re moving up the value chain. We’re more integrated with the customers, and that’s really changing the dynamic to where we can extract more value out of our services.” Reuters
Broader market conditions helped. Wall Street’s main indexes rose on Friday, with the Nasdaq Composite up 0.67% at 11:34 a.m. ET and the Philadelphia semiconductor index up 2.4%, as investors tracked progress in U.S.-Iran talks and moved into technology shares ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. U.S. markets are closed on Monday, May 25.
The risk is that the stock has already priced in a lot of good news. AMD’s first-quarter revenue rose 38% to $10.3 billion, and data-center revenue climbed 57% to $5.8 billion, but the company also warned in its filings that export rules, tariffs, supply constraints, memory availability and competition could hurt results.
Another concern is timing. Big packaging and manufacturing investments take years to turn into steady supply, and a delay in customer deployments or a cooling in AI spending could hit sentiment quickly. On the broader market, Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital, told Reuters that investors were assuming a near-term resolution to the Iran conflict; “If that assumption proves to be wrong, the market will catch down very quickly.” Reuters
