AMD in spotlight as Jefferies downgrades on possible widening gap with Nvidia
Mar. 27, 2025 7:24 AM ET
By: Chris Ciaccia, SA News Editor
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) was in the spotlight on Thursday as investment firm Jefferies downgraded the semiconductor company, suggesting that the gap between it and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is widening.
AMD shares fell 3% in premarket trading.
“Our proprietary benchmarking report suggests real-world throughput of NVDA’s H200 across a range of open-source models is substantially higher than AMD’s MI300x, despite MI300x’s higher advertised TFLOPs and memory bandwidth,” analyst Blayne Curtis wrote in a note to clients, referencing Nvidia's Hopper line of GPUs, which were released in 2023. “A valid pushback would be that the AMD solution is not as well optimized for the models we tested, but we view this as exactly the point. These results underscore the importance of NVDA’s mature software stack for managing GPU efficiencies and this gap will widen as system performance (NVL 72 vs. 8 GPU HGX formfactor) becomes more important.”
Curtis, who lowered his rating on AMD to Hold from Buy and cut the price target to $120 from $135, added that the gap is expected to widen with Nvidia's Blackwell line of GPUs in full scale production. And that should continue with the release of Rubin, set to be released in the back half of next year, he added.
Lastly, Curtis said that AMD has made “limited traction” in artificial intelligence and there is the expectation of a resurgent Intel ( INTC) under new CEO, Lip Bu-Tan. |
