Analyst projects the server CPU market could reach roughly $201 billion by 2030, positioning AMD as a major beneficiary of expanding AI infrastructure demand
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) received a bullish endorsement from Raymond James, which upgraded the semiconductor company to Strong Buy and assigned a $641 price target, citing the rapidly expanding role of CPUs in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The firm extended its “AI Factory” framework to the server CPU market and projects industry revenue could grow at a 44% compound annual growth rate over five years, reaching approximately $201 billion by calendar 2030.
Raymond James expects that expansion to be fueled not only by traditional data-center demand, but also by CPUs increasingly used to host and coordinate AI accelerators and support emerging agentic AI workloads.
While GPUs and other accelerators perform much of the intensive computation behind AI models, CPUs remain critical to the infrastructure surrounding those workloads. They handle functions including retrieval, databases, applications, security, sandbox environments and external tools associated with AI model requests.
The firm’s $201 billion forecast is broadly consistent with NVIDIA’s longer-term $200 billion market framework, while remaining below AMD’s own estimate of approximately $220 billion. Raymond James noted that its projections could reach AMD’s forecast under a more aggressive scenario involving stronger adoption of AI agents, greater concurrency and tool usage, and expansion of AMD’s estimated $1.4 trillion accelerator total addressable market.
However, analysts cautioned that increasing AI workloads may not translate directly into equivalent processor shipment growth. Improvements in utilization and software efficiency, along with custom silicon and workload offloading, could absorb some incremental demand.
Among major semiconductor companies, Raymond James views AMD as offering the strongest combination of direct earnings leverage, data-center exposure and potential market-share gains.
Arm could also benefit through higher server royalties, custom silicon and its planned merchant CPU business. Intel should participate in overall market expansion but remains vulnerable to additional share losses, according to the firm.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s growing CPU franchise represents an increasingly important strategic business, although Raymond James noted that it remains relatively small compared with the company’s dominant AI accelerator operation.
The upgrade reinforces the view that the AI infrastructure opportunity extends well beyond GPUs—and that AMD could emerge as one of the biggest beneficiaries as CPUs become increasingly essential to powering the broader AI ecosystem.
