Sometimes the best investing advice is also the shortest. A caller phoned into a popular financial show asking a question thousands of investors have probably typed into a search bar at some point this year. The answer came back almost instantly, with no hedging attached.
Jim Cramer has spent years hedging his stock calls with caveats, disclosures and careful qualifiers designed to keep him out of regulatory trouble. This time, when it came to one of the market’s most talked-about chipmakers, he barely bothered with any of it.
Jim Cramer says to buy AMD
A caller asked during the September 11 episode of Mad Money whether Advanced Micro Devices was worth buying given how closely the stock tends to track Nvidia’s moves. Cramer’s answer left little room for interpretation.
He first explained why he had not personally acted on the stock sooner. “In my conference call yesterday with the club, I admitted that AMD and Dell, I was confounded by my restrictions,” Cramer said, referring to trading rules tied to his Charitable Trust. “Every time I was talking about it on TV, we’re probably going to buy AMD, and we’re probably going to buy Dell; those are the two best stocks in this market,” he added.
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Cramer did not stop at frustration over missed timing. He praised both the company and its leadership directly, saying, “AMD is a fantastic stock, fantastic company, and Lisa Su is great.” His closing line summed up the entire segment. “Buy it, end of story,” Cramer said, a verdict about as unambiguous as television stock picking gets.
AMD’s data center business is driving growth
The enthusiasm is not coming out of nowhere. AMD’s second-quarter results showed data center revenue climbing 107% year over year to $6.7 billion, representing roughly 58% of total company revenue, while overall revenue rose 50% to $11.5 billion, TheStreet reported.
Profitability improved just as sharply as the top line. Non-GAAP operating income reached $3.1 billion and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share rose to $1.66. AMD guided for third-quarter revenue of approximately $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million.
The company is not just selling more chips. It is trying to sell entire systems built around them. At the September 11 Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference, AMD executive Dan McNamara said the company was “transitioning now to full rack scale,” describing AMD as becoming more of a software and systems company moving beyond its traditional role as a silicon supplier. A shift built around its Helios rack-scale platform, Yahoo Finance reported.
That platform has already landed marquee customers. Meta, OpenAI, Oracle and Microsoft had adopted Helios before AMD struck a separate agreement to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic while supplying up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 chips starting in the first half of 2027, contingent on deployment milestones.
This gives AMD commitments from five major AI companies and cloud providers for its rack-scale platform within roughly a year, Yahoo Finance reported.
AMD faces execution and AI spending risks
The shift toward rack-scale systems raises the degree of difficulty considerably for a company that built its reputation on individual components. AMD must now execute across chips, networking, software, and full system integration simultaneously, a far more complex undertaking than shipping individual processors to customers who handle integration themselves.
Competitive dynamics remain lopsided despite AMD’s momentum. Nvidia still controls more than 80% of the data center GPU market, a dominance built on years of first-mover advantage and a deeply entrenched CUDA software ecosystem. AMD’s newer wins represent meaningful progress but still a fraction of Nvidia’s overall position, CNBC reported.
Macro sentiment adds another layer of risk. Investors grew more cautious about the AI-led rally after industry leaders called for a slower pace of AI development in mid-September, raising concerns about whether massive AI infrastructure spending could continue at its current pace.
AMD has already felt a version of this volatility firsthand. Shares fell after a record quarter when SpaceX said it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, even though Su emphasized AMD’s multiyear AI partnerships and planned deployments with Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic in response, TheStreet reported.
What it all means for AMD investors
Institutional interest has grown alongside the stock’s rising profile. 164 hedge funds held AMD in the second quarter, up from 134 in the first quarter, while short interest stood at roughly 2.5% to 2.6% of AMD’s float, a relatively low figure suggesting limited bearish conviction against the stock, according to Insider Monkey.
AMD’s broader ambitions give Cramer’s simple verdict some real backing. Su has framed the data-center AI accelerator market as a potential $1.4 trillion opportunity by 2030, while CFO Jean Hu raised AMD’s total addressable market estimate to $3 trillion by 2030 at Citi’s Global TMT Conference on September 8, up from roughly $2 trillion just two months earlier.
AMD’s expanding customer list across OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle suggests major AI companies increasingly see the company as a legitimate second option rather than a distant also-ran.
Whether AMD can convert that growing customer roster into sustained market share against Nvidia’s deeply entrenched lead remains the open question hanging over the stock long term.
For now, between rising data center revenue, growing hedge fund ownership and a straightforward, unhedged endorsement from one of television’s most closely watched stock pickers, the bull case looks considerably harder to dismiss than it did just a year ago.
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