AMD delivered a remarkable 77% total return in 2025, nearly doubling the 39% gain posted by its closest competitor. This divergence accelerated in the second half of the year, driven in large part by AMD’s announcement of a multi-year agreement to provide 6 gigawatts of compute capacity for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. CEO Lisa Su characterized the deal as a “win-win” that will accelerate global AI deployments, and investors rewarded the stock for securing a marquee partnership that underscores AMD’s growing relevance in high-performance computing.

Throughout 2025, AMD’s data center business emerged as the primary growth engine. In Q3 alone, data center revenue reached $4.3 billion, a 22% year-over-year increase fueled by strong demand for 5th Gen EPYC processors and Instinct MI300 series accelerators. Management projects a compound annual growth rate exceeding 60% for data center revenue over the next several years, reflecting confidence in AMD’s product roadmap and ecosystem alliances with major cloud providers and enterprise customers.

Looking into 2026, AMD is targeting the rapidly expanding AI inferencing market with its newly unveiled MI400 family of accelerators. Presented at CES 2026, the MI400 lineup includes Helios racks designed for exascale workloads, promising double-digit efficiency gains versus prior generations. Investor focus will center on initial customer deployments, with AMD highlighting commitments from both hyperscalers and large enterprises seeking alternatives to incumbent architectures. Continued traction in inference use cases could further diversify AMD’s data center mix and support margin expansion.

Ahead of its Q4 2025 report scheduled for early February, analysts have lifted EPS estimates by 0.76% over the past 60 days, bringing the consensus to $1.32 per share, up 21.1% from the prior year. Revenue forecasts stand at $9.65 billion, a 26% year-over-year advance. AMD currently holds a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) rating and exhibits a +2.01% Earnings ESP, suggesting a favorable probability of another positive surprise. Investors will be watching guidance for 2026 growth assumptions and any updates on customer ramp schedules for the MI400 series.