Why is AMD stock falling while Intel stock rises after Nvidia's earnings?

Nvidia's blowout earnings gave semiconductor stocks a lift on Thursday, after the world's leading AI chipmaker projected 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028 and signaled that demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure remains well above current supply.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose about 1.7%, while shares of Marvell Technology, Arm Holdings, SK Hynix and Broadcom also gained.

The forecast provided investors with a fresh reason to believe the AI investment cycle has further to run, countering concerns in recent months that spending on data centers and AI computing infrastructure could eventually plateau.

But there was an interesting divergence among the three major US chipmakers competing across AI and data-center markets.

Intel shares INTC rose more than 3%, while AMD shares fell about 1%.

Nvidia, AMD, and Intel compete across the AI and data-center chip markets, with Nvidia leading in GPUs and AI accelerators, AMD challenging it with its Instinct accelerators, and Intel competing through its CPUs and Gaudi AI chips.

Nvidia's deeper push into CPUs has heightened its competition with established players like Intel and AMD.

Intel and AMD have spent decades building relationships with cloud providers and hyperscalers, particularly in server CPUs.

Intel's Nvidia partnership changes the equation

While AMD remains Nvidia's most direct competitor in AI accelerators, Intel's relationship with Nvidia is becoming more collaborative.

Nvidia has invested $5 billion in Intel for a roughly 4% stake.

More importantly, the companies have agreed to develop multiple generations of joint products that will connect Intel's central processors with Nvidia's AI and graphics chips using Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology.

That creates an unusual dynamic for Intel.

Rather than trying solely to displace Nvidia in AI accelerators, Intel can benefit from the growth of Nvidia's AI systems by supplying the CPUs that sit alongside its GPUs.

This explains Intel's Nvidia-led share price rise on Thursday.

Nvidia's gains highlight AMD's challenge

Alongside the earnings announcement on Wednesday, Nvidia also disclosed a deeper partnership with Amazon Web Services.

The company announced that Amazon plans to deploy 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs across AWS's global infrastructure, while the companies will also expand their work across AI factories, CPUs, networking, open models, data processing and robotics.

In an interview with CNBC's "Mad Money," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Amazon could also purchase “millions of CPUs” in addition to the GPUs.

Nvidia is ramping up its own CPU business with Vera, putting it into direct competition with Intel and AMD, the two established leaders in server processors.

This could have been the trigger for AMD's stock movement on Thursday.

Gartner analyst Kevin Knox has previously said AMD is currently the company to beat in enterprise AI server CPUs.

AMD reportedly holds about 33% of the server CPU market, compared with 66.8% for Intel, although AMD has been gaining share and maintains relationships with major hyperscalers.

AMD's stock has nevertheless remained sensitive to developments involving major AI customers.

Earlier this month, shares fell after Elon Musk said SpaceX had selected Nvidia as its exclusive AI infrastructure partner going forward.

AMD had also benefited from Amazon's decision to increase its planned 2026 capital expenditure to about $220 billion from approximately $200 billion.

The latest AWS announcement could therefore have reinforced concerns about Nvidia's ability to capture a growing portion of hyperscaler AI spending.

AMD's AI ambitions continue to expand

Meanwhile, AMD is increasingly pitching itself as a provider of complete AI infrastructure rather than simply a maker of GPUs.

Its Helios platform combines Instinct accelerators, EPYC processors, Pensando networking and ROCm software in a rack-scale system.

The approach is intended to allow customers to deploy the infrastructure required to train and run advanced AI models without assembling individual components themselves.

AMD's growing customer base is becoming an important part of that strategy.

Anthropic has committed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of MI450-series GPUs in Helios systems.

OpenAI and Meta each have agreements covering up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, while Microsoft plans large-scale Helios deployments on Azure. Oracle is also listed among customers deploying AMD's rack-scale infrastructure.

Benchmark responded by raising its AMD price target to $685 from $485, saying “the customer map is getting harder to dismiss.”

Roth MKM analyst Suji Desilva was similarly “encouraged by the technical advantages” of Helios.

The firm raised its target to $650 from $500, arguing that AMD's combination of GPUs, CPUs and networking can support hyperscalers and frontier AI companies at scale.