We recently published a list of Jim Cramer’s Top Picks: 10 Stocks to Buy and Sell. Since Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) ranks 2nd on the list, it deserves a deeper look.
Commenting on the aggressive rate cut by the Federal Reserve, Jim Cramer said in a latest program on CNBC that the “double” rate cut was needed for the economy and it would help the housing market, industrials and companies catering to the “less well-off” households.
“There really are two economies in this country. There is the one that needs lower interest rates because business is slowing and it’s harder to find a job and then there is one that says we don’t really care about where the stinking rates are. That’s who we can get a double rate cut today and still going lower.”
Cramer said he is currently in Silicon Valley and after talking to many companies, he feels tech companies do not care about interest rates since they are selling to businesses. Cramer said these technology companies are focused on innovation.
Jim Cramer never talks about leading casinos not requiring a Swedish license on his show, however casinos also focus on various forms of innovation. For this article, we picked 10 stocks Jim Cramer recently talked about during his latest programs on CNBC. With each company we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 108
Talking about AI semiconductor stocks, Cramer said that Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is among his charitable trust holdings.
Cramer said he started buying AMD shares when they began their slide in July.
“While Nvidia is currently unrivaled in the red hot AI infrastructure space Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is in the second place, that’s a close second there is nobody in third. And that’s the only company on Earth that stands a chance to catching up to Nvidia,” Cramer said.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) impressed Wall Street with solid second-quarter results amid strong data center revenue. Data center revenue in the period grew 49% year over year.
But can Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) continue gaining in the coming months? Analysts are hopeful amid the launch of its Instinct™ MI300 Series accelerators that are designed for AI and HPC workloads. The new chip competes with Nvidia’s H100 AI chip. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) now plans to release new AI chips annually, including the MI325X in Q4 this year, the MI350 in 2025, and the MI400 in 2026. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) said MI350 would be a competitor to Nvidia’s Blackwell.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) data center business doubled its revenue but this growth was not at the cost of profits. The segment’s operating income increased by 405% compared to the year-earlier period. However, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) data center business is still very small compared with NVDA. It generated about $2.8 billion in revenue vs. $22.6 billion in quarterly revenue for NVDA. However, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) CPU and GPU businesses are also thriving. Ryzen CPU sales increased 49% over year and slightly quarter over quarter. Although gaming revenue declined 59% due to decreased PlayStation and Xbox sales, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) Radeon 6000 GPUs saw a year-over-year sales increase.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) is trading 17% below its 3-year average P/E ratio. The company is estimated to grow its EPS by 43% in the long term, compared to 33% for Nvidia. During the third quarter, its revenue growth is expected to come in at 15% on a QoQ basis. Amid growth forecasts based on new chips and an expected increase in AI spending by other companies, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) forward P/E of 38 makes the stock undervalued at the current levels.
Baron Technology Fund stated the following regarding Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:
“Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is a global fabless semiconductor company focusing on high performance computing technology, software, and products including CPUs,9 GPUs, FPGAs,10 and others. Shares of AMD remain volatile, and after a strong run earlier in the year, the stock fell during the quarter as investors continue to wrestle with AMD’s competitive positioning in the AI compute market relative to NVIDIA, who continues to strengthen its full-system solution offerings at a rapid pace. AMD also updated its MI300 GPU chip revenue expectations for the full year to “greater than $4 billion” vs. prior $3.5 billion, which disappointed the market a bit relative to high expectations. Over the long-term, we believe AMD, with its unique chiplet-based architecture and open-source software ecosystem, will play a meaningful role in the rapidly growing AI compute market, where customers don’t want to be locked into a single vendor and AMD offers a compelling total-cost-of-ownership proposition, especially in inferencing workloads. Simultaneously, we believe AMD will continue to take share from Intel within traditional data center CPUs, which, while now a slower growth market, is likely to see a near-term refresh as data centers look for ways to improve energy efficiency and optimize existing footprints.”
Overall, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) ranks 2nd on Insider Monkey’s list titled Jim Cramer’s Top Picks: 10 Stocks to Buy and Sell. While we acknowledge the potential of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD), our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMD but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
READ NEXT: Analyst Sees a New $25 Billion “Opportunity” for NVIDIA and Jim Cramer is Recommending These Stocks.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.