It had been three years and ten months since Lisa Su last appeared publicly in mainland China.

Back in July 2022, when she appeared to launch the Ryzen 7000 series, AMD’s market capitalization stood at only around US$140 billion.

Now, as she returns to the Chinese stage, AMD’s market value has climbed close to US$700 billion, making it the world’s second-largest AI chip company behind Nvidia.

Officially, her visit was for AMD AI Developer Day.

This was the first time the event had ever been held outside North America, with Shanghai selected as the sole location.

From her May 18 meeting with Vice Premier He Lifeng at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, to her keynote speech at the Shanghai Developer Day on May 19, followed by a high-profile discussion with Kai-Fu Lee, the entire schedule was compressed into less than 24 hours.

However, what markets truly care about is not the ceremonial rhetoric, but rather what AMD intends to do in China — and whether AMD can become the company that fills the vacuum left behind as Nvidia’s China business has nearly collapsed.

High-Level China-US Meetings Provide Important Political Support

On the afternoon of May 18, Lisa Su met with Chinese Politburo member and Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing.

He Lifeng stated that the recent China-US leaders’ meeting in Beijing last week produced a series of important agreements, while economic and trade teams from both countries also achieved broadly balanced and positive outcomes, bringing greater certainty and stability to future China-US economic cooperation and the global economy.

Lisa Su positively evaluated the outcome of the leaders’ summit and explicitly stated that AMD is willing to continue expanding its business operations in China while further increasing investment in the country.

In our view, the core objective of Lisa Su’s visit was to maintain AMD’s participation in the China market under the framework of US export controls, while preventing AI chips and advanced computing businesses from being completely cut off by geopolitical risks.

AI Developer Day Sent Three Major Signals

At the May 19 Developer Day event, Lisa Su’s keynote speech lasted only around 10 minutes, but the amount of information delivered was substantial.

During the speech, Lisa Su described China as “one of the world’s most dynamic AI ecosystems,” emphasizing that the most exciting aspect of China’s ecosystem is that it “truly embraces open innovation.”

She also delivered a relatively bold forecast from AMD’s perspective:

More than 1 billion people globally are already using AI every day, and that number is expected to grow to 5 billion within the next five years.

Based on the information disclosed during the event, the Developer Day sent at least three major signals.

First Signal: R&D Commitment

Lisa Su revealed that AMD’s Greater China R&D centers now employ more than 4,000 engineers.

Among them, the Shanghai R&D center has become one of AMD’s largest research hubs globally.

She stated that AMD “must remain deeply rooted in China in order to engage with some of the world’s top AI talent.”

Second Signal: Ecosystem Expansion

AMD EPYC processors are now supporting more than 700 cloud instances across China’s leading cloud service providers.

AMD has also established ecosystem partnerships with more than 100 software providers, startups, and universities in China.

Third Signal: Public AI Cloud Access for Chinese Developers

AMD announced the launch of its first free public AI developer cloud platform specifically for Chinese AI developers.

The platform is powered by Radeon GPUs and integrated with Alibaba Cloud and the ModelScope AI community.

Lisa Su’s visit signals that after Nvidia’s access to the China market became increasingly restricted, AMD is attempting to seize the opportunity created by that vacuum.

Rather than pursuing large-scale chip exports under regulatory constraints, AMD appears focused on maintaining an irreplaceable position within China’s AI supply chain through localized R&D investment and ecosystem partnerships.

If the view that “CPUs are returning in the era of AI agents” gains further validation in the second half of the year, then the significance of Lisa Su’s visit may extend far beyond the publicity surrounding a developer conference.

Wall Street Aggressively Raises AMD Price Targets

On the same day as Lisa Su’s China visit, Citi analyst Atif Malik raised AMD’s price target from US$358 to US$460.

The core reason behind the upgrade was the belief that Agentic AI will significantly expand the total addressable market (TAM) for server CPUs.

Citi now expects the server CPU market to grow from US$29.3 billion in 2025 to US$131.5 billion by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 35%.

The bank also believes Agentic AI CPUs could become the fastest-growing segment, eventually accounting for approximately 45% of the overall CPU market by 2030.

At the same time, Citi forecasts AMD could capture roughly 34% market share within this segment.

Even more aggressive forecasts came from Evercore ISI.

The firm sharply raised AMD’s target price from US$358 to US$579 while maintaining its “Outperform” rating.

Its reasoning is that AI workloads are gradually shifting from “training-dominated” toward “inference-dominated” computing.

As cloud service providers increasingly focus on cost efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO), demand for AMD alternatives is accelerating.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley, Mizuho, and Goldman Sachs have also recently upgraded AMD to “Buy” ratings.

Mizuho’s target price stands at US$515, while Goldman Sachs raised its target to US$450.