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AMD

The S&P 500 Sank by 5% Last Month, but Here's Why This Super Semiconductor Stock Bucked the Sell-Off

April 04, 2026 — 01:05 pm EDT

Written by

Anthony Di Pizio for

The Motley Fool->

Key Points

- AMD is gearing up to start shipping its latest artificial intelligence (AI) chips for the data center later this year.

- CEO Lisa Su believes the company's data center revenue could grow almost twice as fast in 2026 as it did in 2025.

- AMD stock looks attractive on a forward basis, which leaves plenty of room for upside over the next two years.

- 10 stocks we like better than Advanced Micro Devices ›

Ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East have sent the price of oil soaring, fueling fears of a slowdown in the U.S. economy. As a result, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) stock market index plummeted by 5% in March, with many individual stocks suffering even steeper declines.

But Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) bucked the sell-off, delivering a gain of 2.5% for the month. Short-term moves in the stock market are usually just noise, especially during periods of heightened volatility. But AMD is gearing up for one of its strongest years ever, so it makes sense that investors are holding on to their shares.

Will AI create the world's first trillionaire? Our team just released a report on the one little-known company, called an "Indispensable Monopoly" providing the critical technology Nvidia and Intel both need. Continue »

AMD has become one of Nvidia's top competitors in the market for data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are the primary chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) development. Here's why its stock could remain resilient for the foreseeable future.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

AMD is about to ship its most powerful chips ever

AMD began selling AI GPUs for the data center in 2023, starting with its MI300. The company has launched several new generations since then, and even though its latest chips still trail Nvidia's in terms of performance, they have attracted major customers like OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms.

In the second half of this year, AMD will start shipping its new MI450 GPUs, which can be combined with specialized hardware and software in a fully integrated data center rack called Helios. In this configuration, the company says the MI450 will deliver a whopping 36 times more performance than its previous generations of GPUs, like the MI400 and MI355.

In fact, Helios is expected to feature 50% more memory capacity than Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin GPU system, which is widely expected to lead the industry when it reaches customers later this year. A higher memory capacity typically translates to faster processing speeds, so Helios could bring AMD one step closer to matching its greatest rival.

Meta Platforms and OpenAI will be two of the first customers to receive the MI450 later this year. Both companies plan to deploy 6 gigawatts of computing capacity using AMD GPUs over the next several years. Since a single gigawatt requires anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million chips (depending on their performance), these deals could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

2026 could be AMD's strongest year so far

AMD's data center business generated a record $16.6 billion in revenue during 2025, which was an increase of 32% from the year-ago period. It made up almost half of the company's total revenue of $34.6 billion for the year, highlighting its importance to the overall organization.

But this is only the beginning. AMD CEO Lisa Su believes the company's data center business will grow by an average of 60% per year over the next three to five years, starting in 2026. From 2027 onward, Su expects data center revenue to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

However, there is a risk to those rosy forecasts. OpenAI is slated to become one of AMD's largest customers based on the GPU deal I mentioned earlier, but Wall Street is increasingly worried about the start-up's ability to fulfill some of its astronomical financial commitments to chipmakers like AMD -- and also to cloud providers like Oracle and Microsoft.

For example, OpenAI reportedly agreed to rent $300 billion worth of computing capacity from Oracle over the next few years, plus a further $281 billion in capacity from Microsoft Azure. However, the start-up has only $25 billion in annualized revenue, and it's losing money at the bottom line. Although it raised $122 billion from investors in March to fund its ambitions, that barely covers a fraction of its future commitments.

Fortunately, AMD's customer pipeline is quite diverse, so it isn't relying on