AMD and Intel shares rise 32% and 21% in a month amid AI agent boom — CNBC
The boom in personal AI agents has boosted interest in central processing units, contributing to gains in AMD and Intel shares. Over the past month, AMD shares rose 32% and Intel shares gained 21%, outperforming other major technology companies, CNBC reports.
AI agents can independently perform tasks for hours or days, so they require computing resources not only to run models but also to execute workflows. Ryan Shrout, president of consulting firm Signal65, believes that as the number of such agents grows, some of the workload will shift from graphics processing units to central processing units.
Processors for autonomous operation
Meta introduced the Muse agent in early September, and in less than two weeks it topped the App Store. Last week, OpenAI released its Dots agent. According to the agents’ own responses, Muse runs on a computer with an AMD processor, while Dots runs on a virtual computer with an AMD EPYC processor.
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At the same time, Meta said its infrastructure is designed to use different types of central processing units and is not tied to a single supplier. OpenAI also uses several CPU suppliers. Most servers of the major cloud platforms Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are equipped with Intel or AMD processors, although these companies also develop their own chips, mostly based on Arm architecture.
Market and AMD’s position
Graphics processing units are still needed for inference — the processing of requests by an AI model. At the same time, according to Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman, CPUs execute agents’ workflows, while GPUs provide model processing. Virtual machines make it possible to divide one server into several lighter virtual computers for different users.
AMD’s data center revenue in the quarter ending in June more than doubled to $6.7 billion and accounted for nearly 60% of the company’s total sales. According to Mercury Research data released in August, AMD controlled about 46% of the x86 processor market by unit volume. Nvidia also introduced the Vera central processing unit, designed for AI agents, and forecasts that the CPU market will reach $200 billion by 2030.
