AMD shares soar 12% on no company news. Here's what has investors so excited

Intel's latest earnings report showed big demand for central processing units, or CPUs, as companies rush to build out their artificial intelligence capabilities, sending its stock surging. The numbers led investors to scoop up shares of another major chipmaker: Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD shares soared more than 12% on Friday as Wall Street analysts were caught off guard by Intel's CPU performance — which they believe will translate to other big CPU makers.

"We figured CPUs were the next big bottleneck, but Intel's results indicate that is already translating to very significant upside," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria wrote in a Friday note. "The CPU is reinserting itself as an indispensable foundation of the AI era, and the once sleepy CPU market has taken off as agentic workloads shift compute needs" beyond graphics processing units produced by companies such as Nvidia.

Luria upgraded AMD to buy from neutral and hiked his 2026 revenue and gross profit margins. He also hiked his price target on the stock to $375, implying upside of 22% from Thursday's close.

This comes off the back of Intel also issuing stronger-than-expected guidance for the second quarter. Other analysts on the Street took notice of the CPU surge as well.

"Intel now expects double digit server CPU unit growth in 2026, up from their prior expectations of only slight growth six months ago," Citi analyst Atif Malik wrote Friday. He upgraded Intel stock to buy from neutral.

Wall Street sees CPU makers and data center gear providers improving as a group, on the Intel news, with AMD front and center.

"Based on signs of better participation in high AI infrastructure growth, we are significantly increasing our price target to align INTC's target multiple with the company's AI infrastructure peers AMD, MRVL, CRDO, and ALAB (all Buy rated)", Suji Desilva of Roth wrote Friday.

Barclays' Tom O'Malley, meanwhile, wondered whether Intel could lose market share to rival AMD.

"Our downside case of $40 is based upon 47x our downside CY27 PF EPS of $0.85, which assumes greater share loss to AMD," he wrote, citing other factors as well. Intel traded around $81 early Friday.