AMD, Nvidia shares to soar on autonomous driving, cloud chips: Cowen

Sam Yeh | AFP | Getty Images

A chip the size of a coin, used in central processing units and a graphic processing units developed by the US-headquartered Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

AMD and Nvidia shares will rise as the two chip companies benefit from promising secular growth technology trends, according to a Wall Street firm.

Cowen initiated coverage on AMD shares with an outperform rating, predicting market share gains for the company’s server chips.

“While AMD server sales have taken several quarters to materially ramp, we anticipate an inflection during 2H18 when OEM sales should complement cloud growth,” analyst Matthew Ramsay said in a note to clients Thursday. “We remain confident the impressive roster of cloud and OEM engagements including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Baidu, Microsoft Azure, Tencent, JD.com, Cray, and others will yield strong growth.”

Ramsay started his price target from AMD shares at $18, representing 40 percent upside to Thursday’s close.

He also initiated coverage for Nvidia shares with an outperform rating, saying the chipmaker will dominate the autonomous driving and artificial intelligence markets.

“While datacenter and gaming/crypto understandably garner the majority of investor focus, we believe NVIDIA’s auto computing business is on the cusp on significant high-margin growth,” Ramsay said in the note. “In our view, no silicon company has the breadth of solutions and partnerships that NVIDIA has accumulated for end-to-end autonomous driving solutions … We view NVIDIA as the premier AI-driven growth story in semis and possibly the tech industry.”

The analyst gave a price target of $325 for Nvidia shares, representing 31 percent upside to Thursday’s close.

Shares of AMD are up 2.3 percent in Friday’s premarket session after the report, while Nvidia’s stock is up 0.9 percent.

— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this story.