Wall Street Eyes AMD’s Advancing AI 2026 Event

Advanced Micro Devices will hold its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco next week, where the company is expected to reveal new AI accelerators, announce customer agreements and outline plans for deploying GPUs across racks and data centers.

Jefferies’ supply-chain checks indicate Microsoft has become a customer for AMD’s MI400-series GPUs, joining OpenAI and Meta Platforms as known adopters. The brokerage also flagged growing expectations that Anthropic could announce a partnership, noting hires with experience in AMD’s ROCm software stack. Jefferies advised investors to evaluate any new agreements by their economics and highlighted that AMD has provided equity-linked incentives to early customers, which the firm estimates at roughly 20% of the company.

Analysts are looking for technical updates on the MI500 GPU family first previewed at CES 2026. AMD describes the MI500 as a CDNA 6-based architecture built on a 2-nanometer process with HBM4E memory and targeted for 2027. AMD has claimed the platform could deliver a substantial performance improvement compared with an eight-GPU MI300X node.

Jefferies has also discussed plans for a native Ultra Accelerator Link scale-up design that could support as many as 256 GPUs per rack, a configuration that may require optical interconnects. Market participants will watch for confirmation of a co-packaged optics strategy and disclosure of supplier partners.

Public ties and collaborations relevant to optical and scale-up networking include AMD’s investment in Ayar Labs and partnerships with Astera Labs on Ultra Accelerator Link and with Broadcom on scale-up networking components.

UBS raised its 12-month price target on AMD to $700 from $670 and maintained a Buy rating after supply-chain checks suggested stronger demand for AMD’s AI accelerators through 2027. The bank increased its 2027 revenue forecast to $83.4 billion from $79.2 billion and lifted its 2027 earnings-per-share estimate to $14.63. UBS expects the event to include updates on the MI450X accelerator, the MI500 family and next-generation server processors, and identified Amazon and Anthropic as potential adopters.

AMD shares fell about 1.2% on Friday as investors positioned ahead of the San Francisco presentation. Market attention is focused on customer adoption beyond early equity-linked arrangements and on timelines and partners for high-bandwidth optical interconnects and scale-up networking.

The event is AMD’s first dedicated AI showcase since June 2025, when the company introduced the MI350 GPUs and previewed its Helios rack system. The MI500 preview in early 2026 outlined the next-generation architecture intended for data-center training and inference. Attendees and investors will watch for customer announcements and technical confirmations on packaging, interconnects and memory ahead of the planned product launches.