AMD retains Buy rating as notebook shipments increase: Citi

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) retained its Buy rating from Citi Research as August notebook shipments increased 15% month over month.

However, the 15% month-over-month increase was more a reflection of the weak demand recorded in July than a material strengthening of the market. City analyst Carrie Liu forecast notebook demand for the third quarter of calendar year 2024 will show a 4% quarter-over-quarter increase, which is less than the average of 5%.

“We believe the PC recovery appears weaker than expected following our conversations with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Dell (DELL), and Western Digital (WDC) last week,” said Citi analyst Christopher Danely, in a note. “We believe the inventory replenishment in PCs is over and could be a mild headwind near-term.”

Citi’s 2024 PC forecast of 256M units, or 1% year-over-year growth, is in line with pre-pandemic levels.

Citi maintains a Neutral rating on Intel. The PC and server segments comprise approximately 80% of Intel’s sales.

AMD is attempting to grab a larger share of the server chip market, which is currently dominated by Nvidia (NVDA). Nvidia chips are highly valued by cloud companies, but the high cost has prompted multiple providers to augment their data centers with AMD chips as well.

For example, an Oracle (ORCL) executive said some of its cloud customers are using AMD chips to provide inference for artificial intelligence, according to a report Wednesday in The Information.

On Monday, Amazon Web Services (AMZN) CEO Matt Garman indicated its cloud services provide customers with access to AMD chips, as well as those from Intel, Nvidia and AWS.

Although the chips from AMD are not as powerful as Nvidia’s they are more affordable. However, they have a lot of ground to cover to catch up to Nvidia in the data center space.

AMD’s data center revenue was $2.8B in its latest quarterly financial report, compared to Nvidia’s data center revenue of $26.3B in last earnings.

AMD is making moves though, as it announced last month it was acquiring ZT Systems, which will further enhance its ability to provide infrastructure for hyperscalers.

AMD was slightly higher during early market action Wednesday after closing 3.4% higher on Tuesday.