Piper Sandler Starts Nvidia at Overweight With $300 Target

BNP Paribas raised its price target on AMD by 60% to $960, citing remarkable strength in CPUs driven by artificial intelligence, while keeping a Neutral rating on the Dr. Lisa Su-led company. Analyst Karl Ackerman wrote that AMD is increasingly becoming a leading provider of AI infrastructure, successfully pivoting from a silicon pure-play to a full-stack systems platform, and said the firm's new agentic CPU model supports above-consensus estimates driven by AMD's leadership and roadmap to capture a growing share of a roughly $245B agentic CPU total addressable market by 2030. Ackerman noted that AMD's Helios AI accelerators have become a credible second source to Nvidia, backed by 14 gigawatts of commitments, and that the success of Helios, improvements in ROCm integration, and the recent acquisition of World Labs bolster AMD's opportunity to address frontier AI deployments, with OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic having announced multi-gigawatt agreements and AMD potentially capturing at least 8% of the more than $1T 2030 GPU market. The analyst added that AMD expects ASICs and XPUs to serve roughly 25% of the accelerator market over time, with the Cerebras partnership pairing Helios for high-throughput inference with Cerebras' Wafer-Scale Engine for ultra-low-latency token generation, and the Taalas acquisition adding IP and engineering talent for AMD's own low-latency silicon. AMD shares were modestly lower in Monday trading.

Bank of America reiterated a Buy rating on Advanced Micro Devices and raised its price target to $720 from $620, citing the company's opportunity to capture a larger share of the rapidly expanding server CPU market. The firm expects the server market to grow from approximately $61 billion to $211 billion by 2030, with roughly $180 billion of that total tied to AI workloads, and sees agentic AI boosting demand for CPUs that coordinate workloads and manage data alongside GPUs. AMD's data center revenue rose 107% in the second quarter to $6.72 billion, driven by EPYC server CPUs and Instinct GPUs, while client business revenue climbed 23% year over year to $3.1 billion on Ryzen demand. The stock has gained more than 180% in 2026 and trades at a forward price-to-earnings multiple of 39X, roughly double Nvidia's 19X, though AMD's gross margin of 54% trails Nvidia's roughly 75%. Hedge fund participation increased to 164 funds holding AMD as of the second quarter, up from 134 in the first quarter, while short interest stood at approximately 39.98 million shares as of September 15, about 2.46% of the float.

Amazon has established an $8 billion special purpose vehicle to buy and lease back Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips to AWS clients, an off balance sheet financing tool for AI hardware as cloud capital demands rise. Morgan Stanley has reinstated Nvidia as a Top Pick, citing its view on AI data center demand and capacity expansion. The Amazon vehicle and the Morgan Stanley call both sit inside a wider Nvidia AI infrastructure story, alongside Nvidia's own US$500 billion ecosystem financing plans. The structure lets AWS keep building AI capacity without stacking all the hardware on its own balance sheet, pointing to new funding structures that can support large orders as AI factories become more capital intensive across cloud and sovereign projects. The clearest early signal on whether the model scales would be other hyperscalers or sovereign AI buyers setting up similar chip vehicles that explicitly name Nvidia hardware, with disclosed sizes and timelines.

Nvidia said its board increased its share buyback program by $150 billion, leaving $235 billion in total authorization, the largest buyback program in U.S. history according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Advanced Micro Devices said it would acquire AI model and research lab World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at nearly $8.2 billion, a deal Citi analyst Atif Malik said gives the company deeper visibility into how AI models are evolving, while RBC analyst Srini Pajjuri said it could help position AMD to offer full-stack solutions for robotics, simulation and physical AI markets. Micron Technology reported fourth-quarter results and an outlook that beat expectations as its strategic customer agreements continued to increase, and Accenture reported fiscal quarterly results that exceeded expectations on both revenue and bookings, sending its shares up nearly 16% on Thursday. HPE closed nearly 4% higher after saying it won a $1.2 billion order of AMD's Helios AI rack from cloud infrastructure company Vultr, and raised its fiscal 2027 networking growth outlook to the high-teens to low-20s on a percentage basis, with data center networking revenue expected to grow at a low-to-high 50s percent compound annual rate through fiscal 2029. Anthropic intends to launch its initial public offering before the Thanksgiving holiday, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that Broadcom's Wall Street syndicate is starting to gather $60 billion of fresh AI chip financing to benefit Anthropic PBC and other companies, while Meta Platforms is adding a new Meta Enterprise Platform for organizations, tapping MongoDB CEO Chirantan Desai to lead it, and introduced Muse for Small Business.

CoreWeave announced availability of the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, with Cognition as its first production customer, alongside new support for the NVIDIA Vera CPU. Cognition, which uses CoreWeave for training, reinforcement learning and inference, reported that the Vera Rubin NVL72 delivered up to 4.8x higher total token throughput for SWE-2 inference workloads versus a GB200 NVL72 baseline and 3.8x higher output-token throughput for reinforcement-learning workloads. CoreWeave said a Vera rack can contain 128 CPUs and 11,264 cores, theoretically supporting more than 11,000 concurrent isolated environments, and that testing showed more than three times faster agent sandbox startup times compared with an x86 CPU. The company will offer Vera on bare metal using the same operating model and economics as the rest of its infrastructure, aiming to monetize CPU-intensive infrastructure alongside accelerator hours. CoreWeave remains heavily dependent on NVIDIA's technology roadmap and faces competition from hyperscalers and specialized GPU clouds including Microsoft Azure and Nebius Group N.V., which closed four deals in the quarter averaging more than $1 billion each and plans roughly £1.7 billion in U.K. AI compute expansion expected to deliver 65 MW when fully operational in 2027.