Wells Fargo ranks AMD as a “Top Pick” for 2026. The chip company wants to specifically capture market share from the industry leader NVIDIA with its new MI400 series and the Helios rack system.
• Wells Fargo ranks AMD as a Top Pick in the Semiconductor Sector on January 15, 2026
• Semiconductor industry is expected to reach one trillion US dollars in sales for the first time in 2026
• AMD unveils the full MI400 product family at CES 2026
Wells Fargo relies on AMD instead of NVIDIA
The US investment bank Wells Fargo reaffirmed AMD as a top recommendation in the semiconductor sector on January 15, 2026. Analyst Aaron Rakers reiterated his Overweight rating with a price target of $345. In an interview with CNBC TV the same day, Rakers said the semiconductor industry would reach $1 trillion in sales for the first time in 2026, up 29 percent from last year.
The analyst cited leadership in server CPUs, growing strength in AI GPUs and the momentum of Helios rack systems as the main reasons for the bullish assessment. Rakers sees a clear path for AMD to earnings per share of over $20 by calendar year 2029. This path will become more visible over the course of 2026 as the strong product roadmap meets “insatiable demand for data center capacity.”
MI400 series and Helios: AMD’s attack on NVIDIA
As AMD announced in a press release on January 5, 2026, CEO Lisa Su presented the complete MI400 product family at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The flagship MI455X targets large-scale AI training and inference, while the MI430X is designed for high performance computing (HPC) and sovereign AI applications. The chips are based on the new CDNA-5 architecture and have up to 432 gigabytes of HBM4 memory with a bandwidth of 19.6 terabytes per second.
The Helios system, AMD’s first rack-scale system for AI workloads, combines 72 MI455X accelerators with a total of 31 terabytes of HBM4 memory and is scheduled to ship in the third quarter of 2026. According to AMD, the MI400 accelerators will be the first GPUs to use TSMC’s 2-nanometer manufacturing technology. AMD is positioning the chips as direct competition to NVIDIA’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures, which are expected in the second half of 2026.
Competitive advantage through price and OpenAI partnership
While NVIDIA continues to dominate the data center GPU market, AMD is trying to gain market share with aggressive pricing and lower power consumption. The company says its MI355X chips deliver 40 percent more tokens – a measure of AI output – per $1 invested than comparable NVIDIA products.
AMD and OpenAI had already announced a strategic partnership for a total of six gigawatts of GPU capacity on October 6, 2025, according to a joint press release. The first deployment with an output of one gigawatt based on the MI450 accelerators is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026. Wells Fargo also emphasizes that the market is moving from an investment cycle focused heavily on AI training to inference applications, a trend that should benefit AMD.
D. Maier / editorial team finanzen.net
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