AMD Gets a Bigger Target from Goldman
AMD is drawing fresh conviction from Goldman Sachs, which raised its price target on the chipmaker to 640, up from 450, while keeping a buy rating. The stock has already been a strong outperformer this year. Goldman first turned bullish in May, moving off the sidelines to a buy, so this higher target lands just a couple of months after that upgrade and signals growing confidence that AMD sits among the biggest beneficiaries of the next phase of AI infrastructure spending. The target implies Goldman sees significantly more upside from current levels.
The thesis rests on what Goldman calls the agentic AI era. These systems go beyond answering questions. They carry out tasks, make decisions, and interact with software autonomously. A central piece of the AMD case is its CPU business, which has driven much of the recent momentum and demand. Goldman argues that AMD's architecture powers most enterprise servers today, and because AI agents will need to connect with existing corporate infrastructure, AMD stays highly relevant rather than merely relevant.
On the day, shares moved almost 4% higher. The 52-week high sits at 584, and the stock was trading around 536 at the time. Over six months the move has been striking, roughly 150% higher.
ASML: The Dealer at the Table
Bernstein added conviction to ASML, another name that has been an outperformer. ASML functions as the dealer at the table of the AI chip boom. It does not make the chips itself. It makes the machines needed to manufacture them. Shares rose more than 3%, and converting to dollars, Bernstein lifted its price target to 2623. This is a European company that trades in the US as an ADR. Year-to-date, adding the day's move, the stock is up about 70%.
Bernstein's reasoning is straightforward: AI demand is stronger than previously expected, and chipmakers will spend even more on the equipment they need to manufacture increasingly sophisticated chips and keep everything running. The demand story reaches past GPUs from a company like Nvidia. As with AMD, there is both a GPU and a CPU dimension to it. Bernstein also flagged an interesting wrinkle, suggesting memory makers could adopt ASML's newest technology even ahead of the logic chip makers.
Datadog Cools After a Fast Climb
Datadog ran from $98 to $278, a big trajectory in a short span, and in the view of some analysts, possibly too fast. Bernstein put the stock in the doghouse, downgrading it to market perform from outperform. The firm had been bullish and is now stepping to the sidelines. In a move that looks like playing both sides of the coin, Bernstein still raised its price target to 226, up from 180.
The concern centers on expectations rather than the company itself. Bernstein believes investor expectations may simply be too high heading into the back half of the year, which has just begun. This is not a call that the business is broken. In their view the business is intact, and the stock may just be getting ahead of its fundamentals. They see growth potentially slowing after the third quarter. The worry is not customers leaving. It is customers not increasing their spending as quickly as they have in the past. Growth stays strong in this reading, with some speed bumps in the road for the second half of the year. Datadog, like the others, has been a big outperformer.
