相比之下，对于AI芯片领域的另外两大巨头——即英伟达(NVDA.US)以及博通(AVGO.US)，美国银行仍然予以“买入”评级，且目标价均位列华尔街最高水平。因此美国银行将“AI投资热潮大赢家之一”的AI芯片新势力AMD评级与目标价毫无征兆地下调，可谓令市场参与者们颇感意外。Due to rising concerns about ai and personal computer business, bank of america downgraded its rating for AMD, which is also an important reason for AMD's stock price dropping over 5% on Monday.
According to Zhito Finance APP, on Monday Eastern Time, bank of america, known as the "big bull of technology stocks" and "long-term bullish force of semiconductor stocks," downgraded its stock rating and target price for US chip giant AMD (AMD.US), surprising market participants and making AMD the focus of "put" in the stock trading session on Monday. Bank of america lowered AMD's stock rating from "buy" to "neutral," and its 12-month target price from $180 to $155. By the close of US stocks on Monday, AMD's stock price fell 5.57% to $130.870.
Due to rising concerns about ai chips and personal computer chip business, bank of america downgraded its rating for AMD, which is also an important reason for AMD's stock price dropping over 5% on Monday. In its latest research report, bank of america stated that the core reason for downgrading AMD's stock rating and target price is the expectation that revenue related to ai and PC will significantly decline compared to the institution's previous expectations by 2025.
In contrast, for the other two giants in the ai chip field — nvidia (NVDA.US) and broadcom (AVGO.US), bank of america still maintains a "buy" rating, and their target prices are among the highest on wall street. Therefore, bank of america's unexpected downgrade of AMD's rating and target price, described as one of the "big winners" in the ai investment boom, has surprised market participants.
Due to nvidia's continued monopoly in the ai chip field, and the fierce competition posed by broadcom and marvell technology working with giants like amazon and microsoft to launch self-developed ai ASIC chips, more and more investors have clearly lost confidence in AMD's ability to capture a larger share of the datacenter ai chip market. As a result, investors began to sell AMD, and AMD's stock price has fallen over 11% this year, significantly underperforming the phlx semiconductor index and the s&p 500 index, and showing a stark contrast to the performance of popular chip stocks like nvidia and broadcom.
Renowned analyst Vivek Arya from bank of america stated in this research report to clients that data shows AMD has not made any dent in the market share of ai chip leader nvidia (NVDA.US), and the growing preference for customized ai chips launched by broadcom (AVGO.US) and marvell technology (MRVL.US) in collaboration with US tech giants in large-scale datacenters may significantly limit AMD's market share growth potential.
Arya's analysis team at bank of america has downgraded AMD's stock rating from "buy" to "neutral," which means the analysts' stance on AMD has shifted from "bullish" to "cautiously optimistic," and they have lowered AMD's earnings forecasts for 2025 and 2026 by 6% and 8% respectively. At the same time, the target price has been significantly reduced from $180 to $155.
The analyst team at bank of america has also lowered the revenue expectation related to AMD's datacenter ai chip for 2025 from 8.9 billion dollars to 8 billion dollars in this research report, whereas the general expectation from wall street analysts is in the range of 9.6 billion to 10 billion dollars. The institutions believe that the growth scale of nvidia's ai GPU and customized ai chips may be stronger than similar products launched by AMD.
"Although our forecast indicates that AMD’s year-on-year growth rate will reach about 54%, the possibility of exceeding market expectations is very limited, which could continue to put sell-off pressure on AMD's stock price," wrote the analyst team from bank of america led by Alia. "AMD's product line is still over a year behind nvidia's (and nvidia is accelerating development), while AMD lacks a competitive high-performance networking product lineup (such as ethernet switches and optical hardware) compared to nvidia."
Additionally, the analyst team led by Alia emphasized in the research report that an executive from cloud computing giant amazon (AMZN.US) AWS they contacted recently commented that this cloud service provider has "not yet" seen strong demand from customers for AMD chips, but customer demand for nvidia H100/H200 and even Blackwell ai GPUs is still surging, along with strong demand for amazon's self-developed ai chips.
Furthermore, the analyst team at bank of america also stated that they expect some adjustment in demand in the personal computer market in the first half of 2025, which may adversely affect AMD's PC business revenue.
"Although the growth momentum of the PC/server CPU market for enterprise is becoming moderate rather than strong growth, considering the restructuring issues of leading company intel (with a market share as high as 69%), AMD still has the opportunity to expand its share from the current approximately 23%. However, during this period, the adjustment in PC market demand will inevitably affect AMD's PC business," the team led by Alia added. "AMD's challenges (and opportunities) in 2025 will be to capture a larger share in the enterprise PC market dominated by intel while resisting strong competitive threats from ARM architecture-based ai PC products (such as qualcomm)."
