Asian Markets Open Higher, South Korea Surges on Chip Buying After Strong Amazon and Microsoft Earnings

Jim Cramer said on the September 28 episode of Mad Money that Advanced Micro Devices' push into artificial intelligence has opened another growth opportunity as the industry shifts from model training toward inference and agentic AI, pointing to the stock's roughly 13% gain the previous week and its brief move above a $1 trillion market capitalization. AMD's second-quarter revenue rose 50% year over year to $11.5 billion, with Data Center revenue more than doubling to $6.7 billion and accounting for 58% of total revenue, and the company expects approximately $13 billion of third-quarter revenue, implying roughly 41% year-over-year growth and 13% sequential growth at the midpoint. Cramer credited CEO Lisa Su, who took over in October 2014, with AMD's turnaround, saying the stock has rallied an astonishing 18,433% since she arrived, while noting NVIDIA remains ahead in high-end AI accelerators. AMD also announced on September 28 that it agreed to acquire AI model developer World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction, with co-founder Fei-Fei Li expected to join as executive vice president and chief scientist after the deal's expected closing by the end of 2026. Cramer cautioned that the latest leg higher was in part a stroke of good luck tied to the market's shift toward inference and agentic AI, and AMD's own filings flag that U.S. export restrictions affect its MI308 products and that China sales depend on customer demand, import-control rules and licensing, while its 54% GAAP gross margin in the second quarter compared with 40% a year earlier that included $800 million of inventory and related charges tied to those export controls. AMD trades at approximately 39.5x forward earnings, above NVIDIA at nearly 25x but below Intel at 63.3x, and 164 hedge funds held the stock in the second quarter, up from 134 in the first, with short interest at 2.46% of the public float heading into the second half of September.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is reportedly planning to raise $40 billion in bank loans and investment-grade debt, led by Apollo Global Management, to buy Nvidia Corp. chips. The Elon Musk-led company is looking to raise about $10 billion in bank loans and $30 billion in investment-grade debt for the chip order, Reuters News reported, citing the Financial Times. Apollo is expected to lead the deal and help place the debt with a broad range of investors, with Pimco among a small group of lenders in talks to provide financing, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The transaction is expected to close in 2027. Earlier this year, Musk said the company will use Nvidia hardware exclusively to build its data centers, and he said last month that the Colossus 2 data center could more than double its Nvidia chips by December.

Advanced Micro Devices has granted OpenAI and Meta warrants over as many as 160 million shares each, at an exercise price of one cent, according to the company's filings. The warrants do not vest on signing: each holder earns its tranches by buying AMD processors, up to six gigawatts of deployed capacity apiece, so the dilution and the revenue arrive together. The final OpenAI tranche carries one more condition, a $600 share price, a threshold already cleared with AMD trading at $655.90 on October 6. At the current price, the 320 million shares represent roughly $210 billion of value handed over for $3.2 million, close to a fifth of the company against its $1.07 trillion market capitalization. AMD reported revenue growth of 50.10% in the most recent quarter, an operating margin of 17.25% and a net margin of 15.58%, while the stock trades at 167.32 times trailing earnings and 41.72 times forward earnings.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company plans to substantially increase manufacturing capacity as demand for artificial intelligence processors and CPUs continues to outstrip supply. The supply expansion will involve securing additional capacity from Taiwanese supply chain partners, with Su traveling to Taipei to hold discussions with TSMC and other key regional providers, according to Reuters. Shares of the computer processor maker jumped 3.6% in the afternoon session before cooling to $649.82, up 2.9% from the previous close. AMD is up 191% since the beginning of the year and has set a new 52-week high at that price. The stock has been extremely volatile, with 53 moves greater than 5% over the last year.

Lisa Su, chief executive of U.S. chipmaker AMD, said on the 6th that the company plans to sharply increase its semiconductor supply in 2027 to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence. Speaking to reporters in Taipei, Su said, "We have been able to increase supply throughout 2026, and in 2027 we will expand supply significantly." AMD, Nvidia's biggest rival in AI graphics processors, is rapidly expanding its AI chip business, and its market capitalization recently topped 1 trillion dollars. She said one purpose of the Taiwan visit was to secure a system for boosting production of central processing units and graphics processors across AMD's supply chain to meet growing AI demand, adding that as part of talks with local partners she had already met with Hon Hai Precision Industry and planned to meet with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Ahead of a visit to South Korea the same day, Su said AMD is also working closely with memory chip makers to secure adequate supply.

Boost Run, Inc. has signed a five-year AI cloud services agreement with a leading sovereign AI company carrying a total contract value of $525.6 million, with acceptance of the initial infrastructure expected to begin in early Q2 2027. Under the deal, Boost Run will deliver compute capacity powered by NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 GPUs, along with network storage and CPU node services. The contract brings Boost Run's total contract value to over $2.6 billion, a figure representing total revenue customers have committed to pay over the life of all agreements where the Company's signed contracts have upfront payments. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Andrew Karos said the agreement marks an important step in efficiently deploying the company's financing into contracted revenue and demonstrates the strength and diversification of both its customer base and its GPU fleet. Boost Run said it plans to continue converting its strong pipeline into signed contracts, deploying capacity against contracted demand as the AI compute market continues to expand.