Lead Analysis
AMD Rides a Chip-Sector Rally Into Its Highest-Stakes Print of the Year
AMD shares rose 4.12% to $504.60 in Tuesday premarket trading, extending Monday's 1.78% gain to a close of $484.64, as chip stocks broadly extended a rebound ahead of the company's second-quarter report due after today's close, per stockanalysis.com. Wall Street expects revenue of $11.28 billion, up from $7.68 billion a year earlier, and earnings of $1.55 per share versus 48 cents in the year-ago quarter, per Benzinga. The figure analysts are watching most closely is data-center revenue, which hit $5.78 billion in the first quarter, up 57% year over year; Polymarket traders assign a 95% probability the segment tops $6 billion in the second quarter and a 91% chance it clears $6.5 billion, per Benzinga's earnings preview. At a forward P/E of 54.3 — more than double Nvidia's 20.7 and Broadcom's 24.9 — AMD is priced for a clean beat.
"Leading customer forecasts exceeding our initial expectations and a growing pipeline of large-scale deployments." — Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD, via 24/7 Wall St.Su's framing of surging customer demand is the backdrop against which Tuesday's print will be judged, and Wall Street has been raising its bar accordingly: Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon lifted his price target to $600 from $525 this week, projecting more than $14 in per-share earnings by 2027, while Mizuho and Wedbush have moved to $625 and $600, respectively, pushing the Street consensus target to $579.11, per Benzinga. But after a run that has more than doubled AMD's stock over the past year, some caution a clean beat may not be enough: Invezz reported Monday that options markets imply roughly a 10% swing around the print, and that guidance and margin trends — not the headline numbers — will decide whether the report satisfies a market already pricing in near-perfection.
Markets
Chip Stocks Extend Their Rebound Ahead of AMD's Report
★ highlighted = today's news-driven movers.
Companies & Financials
onsemi's AI Beat Meets Texas Instruments' Industrial Chill
- onsemi's second-quarter revenue rose 9.2% year over year to $1.604 billion, beating the $1.589 billion Street estimate, while adjusted earnings of $0.74 per share topped the $0.71 consensus and gross margin expanded to 39.3% for a fourth straight quarter, per Reuters. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $1.65 billion-$1.75 billion, with CEO Hassane El-Khoury telling investors AI data-center revenue is on pace to more than double in 2026. Why it matters: as one of the few major analog and power-semiconductor names with direct AI-driven upside, onsemi's beat-and-raise print signals that AI data-center demand is starting to lift the power cohort even as core auto and industrial markets stay soft.
- Texas Instruments shares fell 3.04% Monday, underperforming the broader technology-equipment sector, as investors grew more cautious about prolonged inventory digestion in TI's industrial and automotive end markets, per TradingKey. Why it matters: TI draws the bulk of its revenue from industrial and auto customers rather than AI compute, and Monday's decline is a reminder that the analog and mixed-signal cohort is still trading on a separate, and currently weaker, demand cycle than the AI-driven names dominating the rest of the sector.
Memory Desk
China's CXMT Expands as SK Hynix and SanDisk Open a New Memory Standard
- Micron is gaining memory-chip market share even as China's CXMT emerges as a fast-growing rival, with the state-backed DRAM maker financing a second 12-inch plant in Beijing alongside new fabs under construction in Shanghai and Hefei, per Barron's. Why it matters: investors are weighing how quickly a state-backed Chinese competitor could erode the pricing power behind this year's memory-industry profit surge, even as Micron's own share gains hold up for now.
- SK Hynix and SanDisk released the first technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash — a new NAND-based memory standard designed to sit alongside HBM in AI inference systems — through the OCP on Monday, per Business Wire. Why it matters: an open HBF standard gives AI system designers a second high-bandwidth memory path beyond HBM, a structural development that could reshape how memory suppliers compete for AI inference sockets over the next several years.
Supply Chain
ASML's Conviction Call and Druckenmiller's TSMC Bet Point to a Durable Cycle
- Goldman Sachs added ASML to its European Conviction List Monday, citing improved visibility into 2026 capacity orders across the lithography maker's advanced and mature-node tool lines, per TheFly. Why it matters: a top-tier sell-side conviction call on the industry's dominant EUV supplier is a bullish read-through for wafer-fab-equipment spending broadly, offsetting concerns about China's homegrown lithography push that weighed on ASML shares in late July.
- Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office held its Taiwan Semiconductor stake after the foundry's second-quarter beat, keeping TSM as the fund's third-largest position even after trimming it earlier in the year, per The Motley Fool. Why it matters: continued institutional conviction in TSMC, even near record share prices, signals confidence that foundry demand tied to Nvidia and AMD's AI accelerator ramps can sustain the current capex and utilization cycle.
Policy Desk
Broadcom's EU Setback and SK Hynix's Labor Talks Test the Sector's Edges
- Broadcom lost a bid in EU court Monday to suspend a European antitrust request for U.S. legal documents tied to its VMware acquisition, a case examining whether the company's licensing practices breach EU competition rules, per Reuters. Why it matters: the adverse ruling keeps Broadcom exposed to potential fines and forced changes to VMware licensing terms in Europe, a regulatory overhang on one of the sector's largest AI-infrastructure suppliers.
- SK Hynix and one of its South Korean unions held a fifth round of talks Tuesday over bonus pay at the company's Cheongju manufacturing complex, per Reuters. Why it matters: an unresolved bonus dispute at a top-two HBM supplier is a cost and labor-relations risk to watch even as SK Hynix posts record profit from the AI memory boom.
Analyst Corner
A Model-Architecture Deep Dive and a Bulled-Up AMD Call Frame the Debate
- SemiAnalysis (published Aug 3): "Kimi K3: The Manos, The Mythos, The Legendos" details the architecture behind Moonshot AI's new open-weight model, noting that both Nvidia and AMD shipped Day-0 inference support on vLLM — a fresh data point on how quickly new AI workloads are landing on both companies' hardware.
- Bernstein, via TipRanks: analyst Stacy Rasgon raised his AMD price target to $600 from $525 ahead of Tuesday's report, projecting more than $14 in per-share earnings by 2027 and calling a path to $20 by 2028 "plausible assuming the AI boom continues," per TipRanks.
Calendar / Week Ahead
AMD and SanDisk Headline Back-to-Back Make-or-Break Prints
- Tuesday, Aug 4 — AMD reports second-quarter results after today's close, with a call at 5:00 p.m. ET. Wall Street expects revenue of $11.28 billion and EPS of $1.55, up from $7.68 billion and $0.48 a year ago, per Benzinga.
- Wednesday, Aug 5 — SanDisk reports fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results, ahead of an August 13 investor day, per Business Wire.
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