Warren Redlich
AI Stocks Report, Equity & Options Strategies
AMD can't undercut Nvidia on price and grow margins while its costs rise faster, and its Helios racks use 50% more HBM than Nvidia's Vera. Lisa Su was evasive about this on the last earnings call. Supply chain constraints and AMD's high P/E are further concerns, even though the company itself is likeable. x.comÂ
AMD, like Broadcom, will have difficulty scaling its supply chain, as it must persuade TSMC and Samsung to commit production to it over Nvidia. With AMD's very high P/E, the stock is very sensitive to such disruptions. The CEOs of AMD, Nvidia and Broadcom are all very good, and it is hard to say who is better. x.comÂ
AMD is among the squeezed price takers in the memory shortage, paying the same memory bill as Nvidia with a fraction of its pricing power. It is already raising GPU prices just to stand still. In every shortage, money flows to suppliers that quote weekly and away from those locked into annual contracts; memory makers are price setters, while AMD sits in the tier where margins go to die. x.comÂ
Insufficient substrate supply may cap AMD's growth because the company has not secured enough capacity. The author says limited substrate availability drove AMD's lowered guidance, making supply-chain execution the constraint on how far it can grow. This adds an execution risk to the earlier concern that AMD is too expensive to buy despite strong results. x.com x.comÂ
AMD could see much more accelerator demand as OpenAI and Anthropic allegedly increase their orders by multiple gigawatts. Nvidia's only real edge over AMD may soon be its size and resources; Lisa Su is a master operator. x.comÂ
AMD and Nvidia face a growing capital burden from substrates without the benefit of foundry margin stacking. Each is committing $1 billion to the substrate ecosystem; AMD has also publicly committed $10 billion to its Taiwan supply chain, more than three times its Q2 net income. That capital is unavailable for R&D and product development, while their gross margins are flat or shrinking. Intel's gross margin is growing as customers prepay its foundry for substrates. x.comÂ
AMD's valuation leaves little room for error even after stellar earnings. Sustaining 40% annual growth to 2030 gives $200B revenue and $80B net income at a 40% margin; at 20x earnings that is $1.6T, or about $990B discounted at 10%, versus $845B today. The market fears its acceleration coincides with the final stage of AI capex growth, as customers diversify from NVIDIA, a tailwind that may fade as capex growth slows after 2027. A solid hold, but new buyers should wait for a bigger decline. … Show more
AMD's secured wafer supply from TSMC and ramping MI450 demand undercut Morgan Stanley's 43% cut to its AMD GPU demand forecast, especially while it leaves Nvidia's forecast untouched. The market is not buying the downgrade. x.comÂ
Higher HBM stack requirements favor Samsung Electronics shares, even as the broader semiconductor industry suffers and DRAM is in dire straits. Daishin Securities says plans for 4-high and 6-high HBM in low-end inference appear shelved, while Nvidia's 8-high Rubin option appears dropped amid base-die supply constraints and customers' preference for bandwidth. x.comÂ
AMD risks missing large advance rack orders because Helios is still unproven at volume manufacturing. It looked credible on paper at July's Advancing AI, but this is AMD's first rack-scale system; meaningful volume is expected only in 2H27, two quarters past AMD's window. Hyperscalers order racks a year or two before seeing them, and custom inference chips are squeezing AMD from the other side. The photographed Helios rack's cabling underscores how hard it is to build. x.com x.comÂ
AMD's bullish hardware case depends on realized GPU prices and costs, not shipments alone: lower selling prices need not lower manufacturing costs. In a conditional September 23 model stress, GPU prices 15% below the reference path with fixed unit costs cut weighted 2030 revenue from $347.84B to $314.76B and free cash flow from $90.13B to $68.59B, about 24% lower. These are weighted outcomes across 16 scenarios, not the standalone Base case. x.comÂ
AMD is a bearish setup, featured as the short idea in the weekend newsletter. x.comÂ
