BofA says the CPU boom could be AMD's next act

New chip, same gold rush

Everyone's been staring at GPUs like they're the only game in town. But BofA Securities says the AI story may be getting a second engine: CPUs. And if that plays out, AMD could be one of the bigger winners.

The bank's thesis is pretty simple: today's AI servers need GPUs to do the heavy lifting, but the CPU still runs the show in the background. As AI shifts from answering prompts to running multi-step agents, BofA thinks CPUs get promoted from backstage crew to orchestra conductor.

The market gets a lot bigger

BofA now sees the server CPU market climbing to about $210.6 billion by 2030, up from roughly $61.4 billion in 2026. That's a serious glow-up — about a 36% annual growth rate — and it implies CPUs become more important, not less, as AI infrastructure scales.

The bank's share map is where things get spicy:

• Intel's share slips from about 34% in 2026 to 22% in 2030
• AMD stays relatively steady, nudging from roughly 28% to 31%
• ARM is the big winner, with server CPU value rising to 47% by 2030

That last part doesn't mean ARM hoovers up all the profit like a vacuum cleaner. A lot of the economics still flow to chip makers and cloud titans building around ARM's architecture — think Amazon's Graviton, Google’s Axion, and Microsoft's Cobalt.

Why AMD still gets the crown

Even with ARM looking like the share champ, BofA still calls AMD its top CPU pick. Why? Breadth and muscle. The bank likes AMD's mix of high-frequency server chips and heavy-core-count parts for agentic AI workloads, where more cores can matter a lot.

So while Nvidia has been the face of the AI trade, this note is a reminder that the infrastructure party has room for more than one DJ. If AI agents really become the next big thing, you may want to watch CPUs the way everyone watched GPUs.

Big picture: the AI boom might not be a one-chip story anymore.