Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) shares rose about 6% on Thursday as a stack of favorable developments landed in a single trading session, building on a 23% climb through Wednesday's close. The rally came against a sharply divided backdrop for chip stocks: Nvidia (NVDA) fell about 5% after CEO Jensen Huang resigned, while Broadcom (AVGO) gained roughly 6% and is up 18% this week through Wednesday. The moves left the sector's biggest names heading in different directions.

William Blair Upgrade

William Blair analyst Sebastien Naji upgraded AMD to Outperform from Market Perform, lifting the stock out of the firm's neutral-equivalent rating tier and into the tier analysts typically reserve for names they expect to beat the broader market. He pointed to Nvidia's leadership issues and Intel's supply challenges as the key drivers of the call.

A New GPU Joins the Lineup

AMD introduced the Instinct MI450X, a new addition to its MI400 Series for data center and AI workloads. The chip carries 288 GB of HBM4 memory — the latest generation of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked type used to feed data to AI accelerators — and slots in alongside the MI455X, matching it on core compute, memory bandwidth, and scale-up and scale-out connectivity. The difference is the amount of memory: AMD said customers had asked for an AI GPU with less HBM4, making the MI450X a cheaper pick for buyers who do not need the extra capacity. The new model gives data center customers a second configuration choice within the MI400 family.

The company also framed the quick launch as evidence of how fast it can tailor the MI400 line. Andrew Dieckmann, who runs AMD's Data Center GPU business, said the series brings “leadership performance” and more options for customers.

The launch also spotlighted software progress on AMD's Instinct accelerators. In a November 11 post on X, the market commentary account Wall St Engine relayed Anthropic's account of an unusually fast porting effort:

Anthropic says its Claude Mythos model got Claude processing prompts on AMD's MI355X GPUs in about 3 days, with almost no human help. That job used to take dozens of engineers 6 to 12 months. Claude wrote or adapted almost all the specialized GPU code needed to make it work. pic.twitter.com/QNd1bM7DR9

— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) November 11, 2026 (post)

AMD also published new performance figures for the MI455X, disclosed alongside the MI450X announcement. The GPU hit 21,333 tokens per second per GPU on DeepSeek-R1 in an MLPerf Inference Offline setup — the throughput-oriented scenario of the industry-standard MLPerf benchmark suite administered by the MLCommons consortium — a result the company says is 30% higher throughput than the latest data from Nvidia's Vera Rubin. The comparison landed on a day Nvidia's stock was falling.

Separately, AMD announced an expanded partnership with PsiQuantum, a quantum-computing hardware developer working toward utility-scale, fault-tolerant machines, to build hardware for quantum computing, adding a financial commitment on top of the technical collaboration through an equity investment in the company. The equity stake extends AMD's presence into a field still at an earlier technical stage than the data center GPU market featured in the same announcements.

What Analysts Are Saying

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya raised his AMD price target to $700 from $650 while keeping a Buy rating, pointing to the strength of the company's CPU business. The new target implies about 21% upside from Thursday's levels and sits above the Street average of $652.18. Wall Street's consensus rating is Strong Buy, based on 29 Buy and three Hold ratings over the past three months, with an average price target that implies about 13% upside.

Pepperstone analyst Chris Weston said the market is separating a problem for Nvidia from a problem for AI. He added that price action shows investors see the situation as a risk specific to Nvidia.

How Trading Unfolded

In early Thursday trading, AMD was up 1.9% and Broadcom was up 5.2%, even as Huang's exit dented the prior session's tech rally. By the afternoon, AMD's gain had widened to about 6%.

---

Source: AMD Stock Jumps 6% as Upgrade, New GPU and Quantum Deal Hit via Blockonomi.