AMD is way overvalued

AMD is currently way overvalued. It closed on Friday at about $514.41 per share. It has an enterprise value of $829 billion. It’s currently trading at about 107 in terms of enterprise value over a trailing free cash flow. In order for AMD‘s current valuation to make sense it would have to grow free cash flow at a rate of 27% every year for a decade followed by perpetual 3% growth assuming a pretty friendly 9% discount rate. Everyone knows that the future of AI is largely speculative. Nobody really has a full grasp over just how much value AI will generate or how much demand will actually emerge. Currently the majority of experiments that aim to replace workers with AI in the workplace have actually generated more cost rather than creating cost savings. The research is already suggesting that for many cases humans augmented by AI may actually be less efficient than humans acting in isolation of AI although the perception of those users is that they are being more efficient. This was a fact I had actually first learned about in medicine where clinics that were leveraging. AI actually became less efficient than those that were not using AI. Another use case with a lot of hype is the potential for AI in programming. I will say AI is pretty incredible. I can make a website or some simple software often within a matter of days. The most people recognize that the quality of the code that AI is generating is not particularly high. Other work examining open source developers show that they thought they were saving time and be more efficient using AI, but in fact, they were less productive. This is not to say that AI will have no impact in the future. I anticipate that AI will be transformative just like the advent on the Internet has been today. However, I don’t think that AI will generate sufficient demand to allow AMD to grow at the rate they require for the current valuation to make sense. I suspect once expectations are revised down we will see a massive drop in AMD’s share price. Currently the market is pricing AMD as if it becomes the biggest and most profitable chip company in the world. Obviously AMD will grow, but I doubt it will grow enough to justify how expensive the stock currently is. If AMD so much a stumbles or it looks like it won’t be Nvidia the stock is likely very expensive. This doesn’t even factor in over the next decade we may see even more competition which ends up eating into AMD’s margins. For example, Elon is planning a new chip. I would not be surprised if we get new contenders from all over the world, trying to break into the space with all of the money that is flowing to AI and AI infrastructure right now.