The stock market has gotten off to an interesting start this year. During the first few weeks of 2025, technology stocks in particular exhibited similar levels of momentum seen for much of the last two years -- thanks largely to ongoing support of the artificial intelligence (AI) narrative.
However, the euphoria came to a screeching halt in late January after a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek released an AI model akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
What took investors by surprise is that DeepSeek claims to have built its AI for far less than what OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and other AI start-ups in the U.S. are spending. Unsurprisingly, technology stocks have been precipitously falling over the last couple of weeks. In particular, chip stocks have really been rocked.
Since news of DeepSeek started to pick up in late January, shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +0.62%) have fallen by roughly 10%. Below, I'm going to analyze some interesting trends in AMD's valuation and explore if now is a good time to buy shares of the chip leader.
NASDAQ: AMD
Key Data Points
What did AMD stock just do?
A valuation metric that I find useful is the forward price-to-earnings multiple (P/E). This ratio takes into account what Wall Street analysts are forecasting for a company's future earnings, which can help provide a glimpse into how industry experts are viewing a company's growth prospects relative to its peers.
In the table below, I've summarized AMD's forward P/E and market capitalization as of quarter-end for the last year.
| Category | 9/30/2023 | 12/31/2023 | 3/31/2024 | 6/30/2024 | 9/30/2024 | Current |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forward P/E | 24.6 | 39.4 | 53.8 | 47.4 | 30.1 | 25.6 |
| Market capitalization | $166 billion | $238 billion | $292 billion | $262 billion | $265 billion | $194 billion |
Data source: Yahoo! Finance
AMD's forward P/E of 25.6 is essentially right in line with levels seen back in September 2023. The key difference that I see is that the company's market capitalization has grown by roughly $30 billion during this 15-month period.
Image source: Getty Images.
Analyzing AMD's performance in 2024
The slide below breaks down AMD's revenue and operating income for 2024. In my eyes, the most important detail on this slide is the company's data center operation since this segment competes most closely with Nvidia.
Image source: investor relations.
Last year, AMD's data center business grew by 94% to $12.6 billion. More importantly, the company is generating significant operating leverage in this business as seen in the widening profit margins. Unfortunately, sluggish growth from AMD's gaming and embedded units is dragging on the company's overall revenue and profit levels -- and that is what I think investors are harping on.
A different approach to AMD's valuation
The closeness of AMD's forward P/E between now and September 2023 implies that analysts are modeling a proportionate rise in future earnings compared to the increase in AMD's share price over the last year or so. For this reason, the company's forward P/E multiple has essentially remained flat instead of expanding.
In other words, I think analysts are modeling both continued growth in the data center business and ongoing deceleration across gaming and embedded chips -- thereby balancing the company's overall earnings picture. Personally, I'm not completely aligned with such an approach. At scale, I think accelerating revenue and profits from AMD's data center business will far outweigh the other segments that aren't part of the GPU push.
The way I'm looking at AMD's valuation at the moment is that the market appears to be applying a multiple of roughly 10x to the data center operating income -- hence, the value of AMD has grown by about $30 billion since September 2023.
I think AMD's data center business is much more valuable than $30 billion in the long run. Nvidia's compute and networking business is much larger than AMD's, and investors have witnessed a historic rise in Nvidia's share price for most of the last two years -- adding multiple trillions to the company's valuation.
Considering AMD is already seeing adoption of its MI300 accelerators with cloud hyperscalers such as Microsoft and tech behemoths such as Meta Platforms (both of which are Nvidia customers, too), I'm bullish that AMD will emerge as a legitimate force in the data center realm sooner rather than later.
I see now as a lucrative opportunity to take advantage of AMD's price action, since I see the company's valuation as massively discounted relative to Nvidia in particular.
