Sticking With This AMD Price Target After Revered Analyst Offers Major Boost

On Tuesday morning, analyst John Vinh of KeyBanc, whom your author sees as one of the very best sell-side analysts anywhere on Wall Street, upgraded Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)  from a "Sector Weight" (hold-equivalent) rating to "Overweight" (buy-equivalent). Vinh also set a target price of $270. Vinh did not previously issue a target for this stock.

Vinh wrote that his firm's supply checks show that demand for chips from hyperscalers has left AMD in a position where the high-end designer is almost completely sold out of server CPUs for the entire calendar year of 2026.

Vinh also thinks that AMD may be considering a 10% to 15% price increase at some point during the first quarter. Vinh also sees demand for the MI355 and MI455 processors — AMD's answer to Nvidia's (NVDA) 's Blackwell architecture — supporting AI-focused revenues of $14 billion to $15 billion for the year.

Who's Vinh? Just a five-star rated (by TipRanks) analyst. TipRanks reports that "Copying John Vinh's trades since 2009 and holding each of those positions for one year would result in a 62% hit rate with a more than 22% average return." Vinh is ranked by the service as number 154 of the 12,040 analysts tracked.

CES 2026

Last Monday, January 5, AMD CEO Lisa Su, who, like your best pal, grew up in Queens, New York, spoke from Las Vegas. 

Su stayed on the generative agentic artificial intelligence message. At the event, on behalf of the firm, Su introduced the Helios Platform, which is capable of delivering up to three AI exaflops of performance per rack. She also introduced the MI1440C GPU, the next generation MI500 GPUs which will be built upon a 2 nanometer process as well as the latest Ryzen processors and Ryzen AI Max+ on-device platforms. Anyone who thinks AMD is simply connected to play second fiddle to Nvidia just is not paying attention.

There's More...

On Monday, China Renaissance (where I know nobody) initiated AMD with a "Buy" rating and a $291 target price.

Upcoming Earnings

AMD will release the firm' fiscal fourth quarter financial results in about three weeks. Wall Street is looking for an adjusted EPS of $1.31 on revenue of $9.65 billion. This would compare well to the $1.09 reported for the same period one year ago, while being good enough for annual sales growth of about 26%.

Interestingly, Wall Street is a little split on this. Even with the support of a big name like Vinh, of the 35 sell-side analysts that I can track that cover AMD, just 17 have revised their estimates higher since the quarter started, while 16 have revised their numbers lower. Two analysts have left their estimates where they were.

The Chart​

​Readers will see that AMD broke down out of a double-top pattern of bearish reversal back in November that threatened to fill the still unfilled gap from early October. However, the stock found its footing above that level and went on to develop a double-bottom pattern of bullish reversal with a $226 pivot.

Relative strength, after a bout of weakness, has returned to a better-than-neutral reading and is now supportive. The daily MACD, which is below the chart, is not yet quite bullish in posture, but is notably improving. The histogram of the nine-day EMA has moved back above the zero bound. 

Though both the 12-day and 26-day EMAs have remained in negative territory for about six weeks and that is not positive, the 12-day line has just moved above the 26-day line. That kind of crossover is short- to medium-term bullish.

Target: $287 (reiteration)

Pivot: $226

Add: Down to pattern bottom ($194)

Panic: Loss of 200-day SMA (currently $1,567)

At the time of publication, Guilfoyle was long AMD and NVDA equity.