On Oct. 8, 2014, Lisa Su walked into her first day as AMD’s CEO. A share of the company cost just about $3 at that time.
At the time, that was roughly the price of a latte at a favorite coffee spot. The entire company was worth approximately $2.5 billion. October 2026 marks her 12th year in that role.
Reuters reports that AMD briefly crossed $1 trillion in market value on Sept. 21, 2026, after shares rallied nearly 13%, then touched an all-time high of $639 on Sept. 25, according to Yahoo Finance. Later on Sep. 28, Jim Cramer called it on Mad Money, saying the run is not over.
Dr. Lisa Su has orchestrated one of the greatest turnarounds in history at AMD, arguably maybe the greatest of all time, and I see no sign that it's going to stop any time soon.
AMD now trades near $616 as of writing, up 187% year-to-date and 281% over the past year, according to Yahoo Finance. The 3-year return is at a massive $499%.
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The agentic AI thesis and why CPUs matter more than you realize
Cramer’s conviction is not about GPUs, but about CPUs, as I have covered several times in my previous pieces. And a specific shift in how AI workloads are being structured.
For years, the AI investment narrative centered almost entirely on GPU compute. Training massive language models requires enormous parallel processing power, and Nvidia was the elephant in the market. AMD carved out a meaningful position, but it was always playing the challenger.
The shift to agentic AI changes the equation. AI agents — systems that reason, plan, take action, and interact with other systems autonomously — require a very different compute architecture. They are inference-heavy, CPU-intensive, and they run continuously rather than in training bursts.
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“Earlier this year, the focus for investors shifted from AI model training to inference and agentics, and it became clear that demand for CPUs was going to explode,” Cramer said. “You need more CPUs to run useful AI agents.”
AMD’s EPYC server CPUs have been taking market share from Intel for years now. In Q2 2026, data center revenue hit $6.7 billion, up 107% year over year, according to AMD’s Q2 earnings release.
The 6th Gen EPYC processors launched this back in July are specifically built for agentic AI workloads.
The story I covered about AMD’s $8.2 billion acquisition of World Labs, a company founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, adds another dimension. AMD is now co-designing the next generation of AI workloads from inside.
What the $1 trillion milestone actually represents
The trillion-dollar crossing is symbolically significant because of the comparison it invites. Nvidia’s data center unit booked $89 billion in its latest quarter. In fact, it is more than 13 times AMD’s $6.7 billion.
Yet Nvidia’s $5.5 trillion market value is only about five times AMD’s, according to Yahoo Finance. Investors are not pricing AMD on the share it could win. That is a bet on trajectory, not current size. Trajectory is where Lisa Su’s record is unassailable.
Related: Jim Cramer sends a blunt message to AMD stock investors
In 12 years, she refocused the company, rebuilt its CPU roadmap, got big into the GPU market, secured commitments from Anthropic for up to 2 gigawatts of MI450 GPUs, expanded AMD Helios deployments with Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, and is now adding frontier AI research capability through World Labs.
“Nvidia’s still the top dog in AI chips, but AMD’s making big money, too,” Cramer said. “Nvidia literally can’t make their own chips fast enough to satisfy the demand. Of course there was room for AMD here.”
30 of 36 analysts who rated AMD in the past three months say buy. Zero say sell, according to TipRanks.
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The honest caveat Cramer included
Yes, Cramer acknowledged that the run creates some vulnerability. A stock that has gained 30% in September alone, briefly crossed a $1 trillion valuation and is now priced more on future potential than current earnings is vulnerable to rotation and profit-taking if unexpected news hits.
But wait, that is not a reason to avoid the stock permanently. At $616, AMD is not a value investment but a bet on what comes next.
The thesis is that agentic AI drives CPU demand well beyond current expectations. The World Labs acquisition could also accelerate AMD’s push into physical AI and robotics. And Lisa Su has a 12-year track record of executing at a high level.
I second Cramer’s verdict that the run is not over. All three reasons above hold. And based on twelve years of evidence, betting against Lisa Su is clearly an expensive mistake.
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