Goldman Sachs resets AMD stock price target for the rest of 2026

I covered Wells Fargo’s AMD upgrade at the start of July, making a specific case that the server CPU story was being underappreciated relative to the GPU narrative. On July 5, 57-year-old Goldman Sachs also made the same argument louder and with a bigger number.

Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider raised the firm’s 12-month price target on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), maintaining a Buy rating, according to the firm’s note shared with TheStreet. The upgrade represents a 42% increase in the price target on a stock that is already up 157.77% year-to-date, as of this writing.

AMD closed July 6 at $552.05, up 6.61% on the session, with a market cap of $900 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. The $640 target implies roughly 16% further upside from that close.

Schneider ranks 289th out of 12,355 Wall Street analysts on TipRanks with a 64% success rate. Again, his call is not a momentum chase but a structural thesis about what agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) means for CPU demand.

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Goldman Sachs raises AMD stock price target from $450 to $640 

Goldman Sachs analyst James Schneider raised the firm’s 2026 price target on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to $640 from $450 on July 5, maintaining a Buy rating, according to the firm’s note. Why? The agentic AI CPU thesis.

The upgrade, according to the note, hinges specifically on surging demand for high-performance CPUs driven by the shift to agentic AI workloads. That framing matters because it mirrors exactly what Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers argued in my previous coverage: the story is about CPUs, not just GPUs.

Related: Top Analyst strongly resets AMD stock price target

The logic is actually straightforward. AI model training is GPU-intensive. AI inference, where deployed models respond to real-world queries, requires a broader mix of CPU and GPU. 

Agentic AI, where multiple AI systems act autonomously to complete multi-step tasks, requires significant general-purpose compute alongside specialized accelerators. Each step up the AI deployment stack increases CPU demand relative to GPUs, and AMD’s EPYC processors are the market share winner in that segment.

Other analyst ratings on the AMD stock price target

• Cantor Fitzgerald’s street-high of $700 above most peers. Cantor raised its target to $700 from $500 
• UBS holds a $670 target
• Wells Fargo sits at $615
• Bank of America at $500
• Citi, carrying a Neutral rating, was raised to $460
  Source: TheStreet

The range from $460 to $700 is a genuine disagreement about how far the CPU ramp goes and how quickly agentic AI deployments scale. Goldman is planting its flag toward the upper end of that range.

AMD’s most recent results show the CPU and data center evidence

AMD’s first-quarter 2026 results, reported May 5, provide the fundamental foundation for Goldman’s conviction.

• Total revenue reached $10.3 billion, up 38% year over year (YOY).
• Data Center segment revenue was $5.8 billion, up 57% YOY, driven by strong EPYC processor demand and continued Instinct GPU ramp. 
• Non-GAAP EPS came in at $1.37, with record quarterly free cash flow.

“We are seeing strong momentum as inferencing and agentic AI drive increasing demand for high-performance CPUs and accelerators,” AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said in the earnings release. 

“Customer engagement around MI450 Series and Helios is strengthening, with leading customer forecasts exceeding our initial expectations.”

For Q2 2026, AMD guided for revenue of approximately $11.2 billion, up roughly 46% year over year, with a non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 56%, according to the company’s outlook. 

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Q2 earnings are estimated for August 4. That sequential step from $10.3 billion to $11.2 billion will be the first quarter where the 2nm EPYC Venice ramp begins contributing meaningfully. The broader semiconductor industry also enters earnings season with strong momentum. 

According to FactSet’s Earnings Insight report on July 2, 2026, the Semiconductors & Semiconductor Equipment industry is projected to deliver 131% year-over-year earnings growth in the second quarter, making it the biggest driver of the Information Technology sector’s expected 63.3% earnings growth. 

FactSet also noted that the semiconductor industry has one of the highest numbers of companies issuing positive EPS guidance ahead of earnings, underscoring the sector’s improving outlook

The hyperscaler commitments that give Goldman’s thesis commercial validation

What makes the Goldman upgrade structurally credible rather than aspirational is the customer base already committed to AMD’s CPU roadmap.

Meta announced plans to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs and will be a lead customer for 6th Gen EPYC Venice CPUs, according to AMD’s announcements. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Tencent have all expanded EPYC-powered cloud instances, AMD reports. 

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AMD and TCS are co-developing Helios-based rack-scale AI infrastructure for enterprise and sovereign AI in India, while Samsung is collaborating on HBM4 supply for AMD’s next-generation GPU platform.

The EPYC Venice CPU began production ramp in late May, with volume scaling expected through the second half of 2026, and AMD noted that more customers are validating Venice than any prior EPYC generation. The follow-on Verano platform targets 2027, focusing on AI performance per dollar per watt.

Also Read: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Latest News and Stories

TheStreet noted that in the last quarter, AMD increased its total addressable market estimate for server CPUs to $120 billion by 2030. Wells Fargo models $25 billion in AMD server CPU revenue by 2028. Goldman’s $640 target is based on the conviction that the market is still underpricing the implications of that TAM capture for AMD’s long-term earnings.

My read, consistent with what I wrote last week on the Wells Fargo upgrade, is that the GPU story has captured the market’s attention while the CPU story has been doing its own quiet work. 

Goldman is making the same bet Rakers made, just louder. Both are saying the same thing. That AMD’s most important growth driver in the next two years is not the Instinct GPU. It is the EPYC server CPU.

Related: Goldman Sachs turns its back on major semiconductor stock