Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), the Santa Clara, California-based chip designer, crossed the $1 trillion market capitalization threshold for the first time on Monday, September 21, after its stock jumped 10% a record intraday high of $615.52. The move pushed the company into an exclusive club of US semiconductor companies that have reached the milestone.

The surge capped a five-day winning streak in which AMD gained roughly 25%, one of its strongest stretches of the year.

AMD is now the fourth US chipmaker to top $1 trillion in valuation. Nvidia got there first in 2023 and is now the world's most valuable company at around $5.4 trillion, leaving AMD's fresh milestone well short of its larger rival's valuation. Broadcom and Micron also sit in the club.

BREAKING: Advanced Micro Devices stock, $AMD, officially crosses above $1 trillion in market cap for the first time in history. This puts the stock up +30,400% over the last 10 years. $10,000 invested in AMD in 2016 would be worth $3,050,000 today.

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) September 21, 2026

With Monday's gain, AMD shares have nearly tripled in value in 2026, up around 185% year to date. That far outpaces the Nasdaq's 15.8% gain and ranks the stock among the top performers in the S&P 500 this year.

The rally follows a rocky stretch. AMD shares fell last month after the company's second-quarter earnings report, which beat expectations but came with guidance that fell short of some investors' lofty forecasts. Even so, the quarterly results showed revenue growth of 50%, driven largely by AI-related demand. The episode illustrated how elevated expectations had become: even growth of that pace was not enough to satisfy the most ambitious forecasts.

Strong Data Center Growth Driving the Rally

Second-quarter revenue came in at $11.54 billion, up 50% from $7.69 billion a year earlier. The Data Center unit drove much of that growth, posting $6.7 billion in sales, a 107% year-over-year increase. That means data center hardware now accounts for more than half of AMD's quarterly revenue, making the unit the clearest read on how the company's AI business is developing.

AMD said it expects data center sales to accelerate in the second half of 2026. Chief Executive Lisa Su, who has led the company since 2014, said last month that it expects to double data center sales by 2027. Those targets give concrete checkpoints in the quarters ahead: whether second-half data center sales accelerate as the company projects, and how AMD tracks toward the 2027 doubling goal.

Investor sentiment around AI spending has shifted as well. Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital, said money is moving back into the AI trade, noting that investors view AI as one of the few areas that can hold up in a slower economic environment.

Broader Chip Sector Rallies

AMD was not alone in Monday's advance. Intel jumped around 11.8% and Qualcomm rose 4.5%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbed 2.7% to reach a one-month high. The index is a benchmark often used as a gauge of sentiment toward the semiconductor industry.

The company has also been expanding beyond standalone chips into complete AI systems that combine processors, networking gear, and related hardware — a push seen as a more direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance in AI computing.

On the CPU side, growing demand for central processing units used alongside GPUs in inference servers — the machines that run trained AI models on live workloads — has helped AMD take market share from Intel, its longtime rival in processors.

AMD currently trades at around 41 times its 12-month forward earnings, below its 10-year average of 44 but well above Nvidia's 16.3 times forward earnings. Forward multiples price a stock against projected earnings for the coming year rather than trailing results, meaning a higher figure reflects more being paid per dollar of expected earnings.

This article originally appeared on CoinCentral.