AMD Rallies with AI… Key Executives Sell Millions in Shares

In mid-April, Mark Papermaster, AMD’s Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, exercised stock options under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan and sold several tens of thousands of common shares. On April 24, he sold an additional stake valued at about $10.96 million. Following these transactions, Papermaster still directly holds over 1.2 million shares—worth roughly $349 million—and maintains further indirect holdings through a separate trust.

On May 8, Paul Grasby, an AMD executive at the Chief Strategy Officer level, sold approximately $10.8 million worth of shares in an open-market transaction, although regulatory filings show he continues to own more than 100,000 shares.

In its May 5 release of first-quarter 2026 results, AMD reported revenue of about $10.3 billion and confirmed a surge in demand for AI data-center chips. The announcement drove AMD’s market capitalization to around $660 billion and pushed its share price to an all-time high. The company is also expanding its AI infrastructure business through a multiyear enterprise AI cloud partnership with Rackspace. After a strong rally, AMD’s stock has experienced heightened volatility amid a short-term pullback.

Headquartered in the U.S., AMD is a leading fabless semiconductor design firm supplying high-performance chips—including x86 server EPYC CPUs, Ryzen PC processors, Radeon GPUs, and Instinct AI accelerators—and is ranked alongside Nvidia and Intel among the global “Big Three” in semiconductors. Recently, AMD has invested in next-generation Zen architecture, AI GPUs, and its Rackscale AI platform, broadening collaborations with major clients such as Meta and leading cloud providers to strengthen its influence in the AI infrastructure market.