Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) shares jumped higher Monday following an upgrade from Barclays that looks to extend last week's chip sector rally.
Barclays analyst Blayne Curtis lifted his rating AMD to 'overweight', with a $15 improvement to his price target, now pegged at $85, citing the chipmaker's lead over rival Intel (INTC) in the server market following the launch of its new data center product Genoa late last year. CEO Lisa Su said Genoa will translate into "lower capex, lower opex and lower total cost of ownership" for enterprises and for cloud data centers.
"Intel won't have an answer until Granite Rapids/Sierra Forest, which is slated for 2024 but more likely arrives in 2025," Curtis wrote, referring to that chipmaker's 6th generation Xeon platform and its new, parallel -developed Xeon CPU.
Curtis also said AMD could see the potential for it to build gains from Meta Platforms when it accelerates spending later this year.
AMD shares were marked 7.85% higher in early afternoon trading Monday, following on from Friday's 3.5% advance, to change hands at $75.57 each.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor index, the chip sector benchmark, rose 3.11% on Friday to extend its January gain to around 10.4%.
Late last year, AMD posted modestly weaker-than-expected third quarter earnings of 67 cents per share, on revenues of $5.6 billion, but noted solid gains for its gaming and data center businesses that partly offset further weakness expected in demand for personal computing chips.
Looking into the final months of the year, however, AMD said it sees quarterly revenue in the region of $5.5 billion, plus or minus $300 million, with gross margins rising to around 51% on sequential growth for its embedded and data center units. Refinitv estimates were looking for a revenue forecast of around $5.85 billion.
Intel will publish its fourth quarter earnings on Thursday, after the close of trading, with analyst looking for an adjusted bottom line of 20 cents per share on revenues of $14.47 billlion.
Last autumn, Intel said it sees overall revenues in the region of $63.5 billion, down form its prior forecast of between $65 billion and $68 billion
The group lowered its forecast for PC demand, as well, for both this year and next, while detailing cost reduction plans it said would save $3 billion in 2023 and a further $8 billion to $10 billion by 2025.
