US Stock Market Weekly Earnings Preview: AI Chip Sector Gears Up for "Three Major Battles"

August 4th. This week, the US stock chip sector welcomed a series of key financial reports. AMD will release its second-quarter earnings after the US market closes on Tuesday, August 4. SanDisk and Western Digital will announce their fiscal fourth quarter and full-year performance after the US market closes on Wednesday, August 5.

The significance of these three reports lies not only in the performance of individual companies. After a sharp decline in July, AI hardware stocks, the market is looking for evidence of whether the "chip sector has recovered." Last week, cloud providers such as Microsoft and Amazon eased concerns about AI capital expenditure return in their financial reports, and the storage chain, including Samsung and Micron, reignited sector sentiment. In last Thursday's recovery market, Micron surged by 18%, SanDisk by 26%, and Lam Research by 18%, leading to a market rebound driven by chip stocks.

AMD faces the first tough battle. The market is most concerned about AMD's two growth drivers: the EPYC server CPU and AI accelerator. Analysts estimate that AMD's revenue in the second quarter is about $11.3 billion, with data center revenue of about $6.5 billion, including around $4 billion in server chip revenue and $2.5 billion in AI-related revenue; adjusted EPS is estimated to be around $1.62. Citing Visible Alpha data, Investopedia reports that the market expects AMD's revenue in the second quarter to be around $11.34 billion, a 48% year-over-year growth, with adjusted EPS at $1.61, triple the figure from the same period last year.

The real highlight of AMD's financial report is guidance. Jeffrey analyst Blayne Curtis is optimistic about AMD's new generation Venice server CPU and the Helios rack-level AI system based on the MI450 GPU. Clients such as OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Anthropic are seen by the market as potential demand sources for Helios; initial shipments may start in the third quarter, but significant revenue contribution is expected after the fourth quarter.