AMD poised for growth as AI workloads shift toward CPUs

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), which competes across CPUs and GPUs, stands to benefit from a significant expansion in the server processor market driven by agentic artificial intelligence. Bank of America has raised its 2030 server CPU market estimate to more than $210 billion from about $170 billion, reflecting expectations that the market will grow at a 36% annual rate from roughly $35 billion in 2025.

The key driver of this forecast revision is a fundamental shift in how AI workloads are evolving inside data centers. During the training-heavy phase of the AI boom, data centers operated with a ratio of roughly one CPU for every four GPUs. Bank of America expects agentic AI to push that ratio much closer to 1:1, as CPUs take on substantially more orchestration and control tasks. This shift is significant because it positions CPUs as additive to the broader AI infrastructure opportunity rather than simply being displaced by GPUs, as some earlier market analyses had suggested.

Bank of America named AMD its top CPU pick, citing the company's strength in both frequency and core count—attributes that support the orchestration demands of agentic workloads. While Nvidia remains the firm's overall semiconductor favorite and both Intel and Arm also stand to benefit from expanded CPU demand, AMD's technical positioning makes it a focal point for the anticipated market expansion. For investors, the broader takeaway is that the next phase of AI spending may significantly broaden well beyond GPUs, opening a larger addressable market for CPU manufacturers than the training-phase dynamics would have suggested.