As AMD charges forward with its AI GPU ambitions, Wall Street remains skeptical. Despite AMD’s unveiling of its MI350 series GPUs-touting a 4x improvement in AI compute and 35x in inferencing power-analyst William Stein from Truist Securities isn’t buying the hype just yet.
Stein has maintained a ‘Hold’ rating on AMD stock with a lowered price target of $111, citing a roughly 20% downside risk from current levels.
According to Stein, there’s a lingering question: are customers choosing AMD for its technology, or simply to shake up NVIDIA’s pricing dominance? His take leans toward the latter-suggesting buyers may be using AMD as a bargaining chip rather than a genuine choice. Supporting this, Stein claims his channel checks show a mysterious build-up of AMD inventory, raising questions about true demand.
AMD, for its part, is moving aggressively. Besides the MI350, the company also launched ROCm 7, an open-source software stack that reportedly delivers up to 3.5x improvements in AI inference and 3x in training performance. Looking ahead, AMD plans to release its Helios rack solution in 2026, integrating MI400 GPUs, Zen 6 Venice CPUs, and Vulcano NICs. A next-gen Helios successor using MI500 GPUs is already teased for 2027.
Yet Stein’s skepticism goes beyond speculation. He pointed to the recent Amazon AWS logo snafu-briefly shown, then removed from AMD’s customer list. Stein explains that Amazon prefers to announce partnerships independently, adding a layer of PR ambiguity to AMD’s messaging.
Still, other analysts, like C.J. Muse from Cantor Fitzgerald, see promise. Muse expects AMD’s AI revenues to hit $6 billion in the second half of 2025, boosted by the MI350 launch. And among users, the sentiment is mixed but not silent: many recall how AMD’s past innovations pushed both Intel and NVIDIA to evolve, sometimes kicking and screaming.
Despite the doubts from Wall Street, real-world buyers continue choosing AMD for value, efficiency, and availability-not some abstract economic experiment. After all, without AMD, we’d still be paying over a grand for quad-core CPUs and mid-tier GPUs with barely enough VRAM to load modern games. As one user put it: ‘Imagine no AMD. Paying 1k for a 5060. XD.’
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