Wall Street’s Top Analysts Back AMD and Microsoft for Long-Term AI Growth

CNBC reported Sunday that Wall Street analysts are doubling down on several technology stocks after a robust earnings season underscored sustained demand for AI infrastructure.

AMD Raises Its Own Ceiling After Blowout Quarter

Chip designer Advanced Micro Devices delivered first-quarter results that exceeded market expectations. The company now identifies its data center segment as the primary engine of revenue and earnings growth going forward.

TD Cowen analyst Joshua Buchalter responded by reiterating a buy rating and lifting his price target to $500 from $290. He pointed to accelerating server CPU growth, which expanded more than 50% year-over-year across enterprise and cloud customers. AMD’s Turin processor family represented over half of that unit mix, pushing average selling prices higher.

AMD now expects its server CPU business to grow more than 70% in the second quarter. Buchalter sees continued momentum through the second half of 2026 and into 2027. Notably, AMD doubled its CPU total addressable market estimate over just six months, bringing it to roughly $120 billion. Agentic AI applications are driving that expansion.

Buchalter also flagged AMD’s Instinct GPU line as a separate growth lever. He now forecasts roughly $17 billion in data center GPU revenue for 2026 and about $38 billion for 2027. His AMD thesis rests on the company gaining meaningful share across a vast AI compute market as customer confidence grows.

Microsoft’s Cloud Backlog Hits $625 Billion

Microsoft is benefiting from the same infrastructure wave through its Azure cloud platform and its Copilot productivity suite. Tigress Financial analyst Ivan Feinseth raised his price target on Microsoft to $680 from $595, maintaining a buy rating.

Feinseth pointed to Azure growth running in the high-30% range, pulling overall cloud revenue into the mid-20% growth corridor. That pace reflects enterprises migrating workloads and scaling AI training deployments on Microsoft’s platform.

The analyst highlighted that Microsoft’s commercial cloud backlog has more than doubled over the past year, reaching $625 billion. That figure provides what Feinseth described as multi-year revenue visibility. Copilot integration across Microsoft 365, Dynamics, and developer tools is expected to lift average revenue per user while improving customer retention.

Why Analysts Upgraded Now

The timing of both upgrades follows an earnings season that reinforced confidence in AI-linked capital spending. Enterprise budgets for cloud and compute are holding firm despite broader macro uncertainty. Buchalter ranks 69th among more than 12,200 analysts tracked by TipRanks, with a 72% success rate on his ratings.

Both AMD and Microsoft remain central to the investment case for AI infrastructure heading into the second half of 2026.

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