AMD Receives Positive Momentum: Analysts Raise Target Price, Microsoft to Adopt Helios

According to Yahoo Finance, AMD (AMD-US) shares rose 1.6% on Monday (20th) following upward revisions of the company's target price by investment firms Rosenblatt and UBS, as well as Microsoft (MSFT-US) announcing its adoption of AMD's upcoming Helios rack-level AI platform to power AI workloads on its Azure cloud services.

The news of target price increases and Microsoft's partnership comes just days before AMD's Advancing AI event in San Francisco, where CEO Lisa Su is set to deliver a keynote address, unveiling the latest updates on the company's product roadmap and future strategic goals.

Rosenblatt raised its target price for AMD from $490 to $655, while UBS increased its target from $670 to $700. Bloomberg data shows that approximately 82.4% of analysts currently rate AMD as a 'Buy,' with the remaining 17.6% maintaining a 'Hold' rating.

This collaboration with Microsoft marks a significant step for AMD as it prepares to begin shipping the Helios platform to customers. AMD plans to deliver Helios later this year to clients including Meta (META-US) and Oracle (ORCL-US).

Helios integrates AMD's Instinct MI455X (GPU), EPYC Venice (CPU), Pensando DPU (DPU), and ROCm software platform into a complete rack-level AI system, designed to directly compete with NVIDIA's (NVDA-US) popular Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms.

Like NVIDIA's offerings, Helios packs 72 GPUs into a single rack, using high-speed interconnects to enable direct GPU-to-GPU communication. Multiple racks can be linked to form massive GPU clusters, supporting intensive AI computing tasks.

However, NVIDIA is not standing still amid AMD's advances. The company has announced its next-generation Kyber rack platform, which will double the number of GPUs per rack from 72 to 144.

AMD's stock has surged 139% year-to-date and 226% over the past 12 months, driven by continued adoption of AMD's CPUs by major cloud providers for data centers supporting rapidly growing AI workloads.

This demand has significantly boosted AMD's data center business, with data center revenue rising from $6.5 billion in 2023 to $16.6 billion in 2025, and analysts projecting it to reach $31.2 billion this year.

The strong growth in data center revenue is expected to offset weakness in the gaming segment. Analysts forecast a 25% decline in gaming revenue this year, while client segment revenue is projected to grow by 11%.