Contrasting Views on AMD from Two High-Profile Investors

ARK Invest, managed by Cathie Wood, recently reduced its stake in Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) by selling 25,917 shares across four ETFs on August 17. In a striking contrast, Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office established a new 72,900-share AMD position in its second-quarter filing, while simultaneously exiting Broadcom, Micron, and Intel.

The decision by these two prominent investors to move in opposite directions on AMD highlights the differing perspectives on the company’s valuation and growth prospects. While Wood’s ARK Invest has been trimming its exposure to AMD, citing the stock’s high valuation, Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office is betting on the company’s potential for future success.

Why Druckenmiller May See More Upside in AMD

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD)’s operating momentum makes the bullish case easy to understand. The company’s second-quarter revenue jumped 50% year over year to $11.54 billion, while Data Center revenue more than doubled to $6.72 billion. Management guided third-quarter revenue to about $13 billion, above Wall Street expectations.

The bigger prize arrives with the MI450 generation and Helios rack-scale systems. AMD has agreements with Anthropic for up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 deployments, while Microsoft plans to deploy Helios and next-generation EPYC processors across Azure. This gives AMD a credible route from being Nvidia’s distant GPU challenger to becoming a broader AI-infrastructure supplier.

Why Wood May Be Trimming Her Exposure to AMD

The reason behind Wood’s decision to trim her exposure to AMD lies in the company’s valuation. AMD recently traded around 70 times forward earnings, a valuation that already assumes years of exceptional AI growth. Investors demonstrated how unforgiving that setup can be after the August 4 earnings report: AMD beat quarterly estimates and guided revenue above consensus, yet the shares still fell sharply after hours because expectations were even higher.

Wall Street shows the same tension, going by the fact that Wells Fargo carries a $700 target, while Morgan Stanley sits at $465 with an Equal-Weight rating. AMD can execute spectacularly well and still disappoint if earnings estimates do not rise fast enough to support the multiple.

Insider Monkey’s Q2 data showed mixed hedge-fund positioning in AMD. D.E. Shaw cut its common-stock stake by 21%, while Marshall Wace increased its position by 3%. Short interest remained modest at 37.75 million shares, or about 2.32% of float, as of July 31.

The split between Wood and Druckenmiller therefore looks less like a disagreement about whether AMD belongs in the AI race and more like a disagreement about how much future success is already priced in. AMD’s growth and customer pipeline remain pretty compelling, but the current multiple leaves little room for ordinary execution. The risk-reward calculus becomes substantially more attractive if valuation cools while MI450 demand continues to strengthen.