Was There Any Sign AMD Stock Would Run?

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A $10,000 position in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) purchased on October 27, 2025, was worth about $22,280 at the market close on October 28, 2026. The stock was already climbing before that year began, posting a 169.4% gain in the six months leading up to October 27. Over the year itself, AMD’s data center business, which sells server processors and AI accelerators, grew to account for more than half of the company’s quarterly sales. How much of that could an investor have seen before October 27, 2025?

AMD Pointed To Data Center Chips A Year Early

During its fiscal Q3 2024 earnings call on October 29, 2024, management said revenue from AMD’s data center GPUs had ramped as adoption of the MI300X chip expanded. They also said that Instinct and EPYC chips set sales records. At the time, AMD also said it would acquire ZT Systems, an AI infrastructure provider, for its expertise in delivering complete racks.

The company’s financial results soon tracked that commentary. Company-wide sales growth increased in each quarter, rising from 17.6% year-over-year in the period ended September 2024 to 35.9% in the quarter ended March 2025. Between those reports, during a February 4, 2025 call, management said AMD had established a multi-billion dollar data center AI business.

These early indicators were not entirely positive. During the August 5, 2025 call, management said U.S. export restrictions had effectively eliminated sales of AMD’s MI308 chips to China. The company reported an operating loss for the quarter ended June 2025, and management has said that quarter included about $800 million of charges tied to those restrictions.

The most specific signal arrived on October 6, 2025, three weeks before October 27. AMD and OpenAI announced that OpenAI would deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs across several generations, beginning with 1 gigawatt of MI450 chips in the second half of 2026. That agreement detailed the customer, the size, and the start date, and anyone could read it before the year began.

AMD Now Sells Mostly To Data Centers

In the quarter ended June 2026, data center revenue accounted for 58% of AMD’s total sales, up from 42% in the same period a year earlier, management said on the August 4, 2026 call. That revenue more than doubled from a year earlier, which management attributed to strong demand for its EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators. During the same presentation, management listed the OpenAI agreement, alongside one with Meta, among its gigawatt-scale deployments.

This shift unfolded during a year when AMD stock far outran the market, while the S&P 500 returned 14.0% over the same dates. Its biggest one-day gain, 18.6% on May 6, 2026, came the day after AMD reported first-quarter results in which data center revenue rose 57%. Other chip makers did not all keep pace with AMD’s 122.8% return. NVIDIA returned 12.7% over that year, while Intel returned 141.6%, more than AMD.

Is AMD Still Signing Data Center Customers?

The company was still signing data center customers as of its August 4, 2026 call, when it announced a new partnership with Anthropic. Anthropic will deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 chips in AMD’s Helios systems, with the first gigawatt starting in the first half of 2027. Additionally, Microsoft will deploy Helios at scale on Azure, management said. On October 27, 2026, AMD and Meta announced an expanded partnership in which AMD Helios rack systems will power Meta’s frontier models, and AMD said it would invest $1 billion in Meta’s stock offering.

This offered the same kind of evidence as the OpenAI agreement from October 2025: a named customer whose sales materialize later. Helios shipments were scheduled to begin in the quarter ended September 2026. Management expects data center revenue to more than double in 2027, a forecast rather than a result.

AMD’s data center revenue, which reached a record $6.7 billion in the quarter ended June 2026, is the figure to watch when the company reports in November 2026.

Sitting On A Big Gain In Advanced Micro Devices?

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