Advanced Micro Devices Wins Upgrade as Nvidia Faces Downgrade

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•  12 Nov 2026
 

$AMD Advanced Micro Devices received an upgrade to Outperform from Market Perform at William Blair after Jensen Huang announced his departure from Nvidia. In the same report, analyst Sebastian Naji downgraded Nvidia to Market Perform from Outperform. William Blair argues that the leadership change could prompt cloud providers to spread orders across more suppliers.

$NVDA Nvidia founder Jensen Huang announced that he would step down as president and CEO and relinquish his board seat after leading the company he founded 33 years ago. The announcement follows about two weeks of reports about his personal life. On Sunday, Huang confirmed an intimate relationship with a businesswoman whom US intelligence officials reportedly suspect of spying for China, and the board opened an inquiry into his conduct that day. The article reports that a separate relationship with a company executive who reported to him came to light yesterday. Nvidia named CFO Colette Kress acting CEO.

Naji says Nvidia faces heightened scrutiny and a potential leadership vacuum, while demand for its chips remains intact in his analysis. Cloud providers order tens of billions of dollars in accelerators each year and rely almost entirely on a single supplier. A sudden leadership change at that supplier could accelerate efforts to diversify orders. Advanced Micro Devices is the leading alternative in general-purpose accelerators.

Advanced Micro Devices reported about $13.4 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 45% year over year. Data center revenue nearly doubled to $8.5 billion, and adjusted earnings per share rose 74% to $2.09. The company expects fourth-quarter revenue of about $17 billion, with a range of 3% on either side, and an adjusted gross margin of about 55%. Free cash flow fell to about $550 million, largely because inventory increased by about $3 billion. The company attributes the inventory build to preparations for data center demand.

Helios systems account for part of the growth at Advanced Micro Devices. The complete server racks use MI450 accelerators and sixth-generation EPYC processors. Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle already run models on the systems. Microsoft will deploy Helios in Azure data centers.

Server CPUs are the focus of the William Blair report. Intel continues to face delays and supply problems with its Xeon processors. William Blair projects that the server CPU market will reach about $220 billion in 2030 and expects Advanced Micro Devices to get there a year ahead of Intel. Naji expects that lead to widen and estimates that the share of market revenue captured by Advanced Micro Devices could exceed the 40% to 45% range William Blair projected when it initiated coverage.

Custom chip projects could also create demand for server CPUs from Advanced Micro Devices because each custom accelerator needs a CPU alongside it. Naji says the ASICs that Meta and OpenAI develop in-house still pose a risk to Instinct sales at those customers. About a year ago, OpenAI signed an agreement with Advanced Micro Devices to deploy 6 gigawatts of accelerators and received warrants to buy up to 160 million shares.

Nvidia, which was valued at about $4 trillion, is down about 10% today after losing about 16% in the week and a half before the departure announcement. Advanced Micro Devices is up about 2%, Broadcom is up about 5%, and the Nasdaq 100 is trading about 9.5% below its October high. Shares of Advanced Micro Devices have more than doubled since the start of the year and trade at about 60 times estimated 2026 earnings, pricing in some of the optimism.

William Blair joins a clear majority on Wall Street, where about six in seven analysts covering Advanced Micro Devices recommend buying the stock. Nvidia is due to report quarterly results later this month. It will be the first quarterly report under Kress.

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