When one of Wall Street‘s most closely watched fund managers starts trimming a stock that’s on a tear, investors take notice.
Cathie Wood has been quietly but consistently reducing her firm’s position in Advanced Micro Devices throughout May.
That alone raises a question worth asking: What does she know that the rest of the market is still pricing in?
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been one of the hottest names in semiconductors this year.
Valued at a market cap of $820 billion, the chip giant has returned 135% in 2026 and is up 357% in the last 12 months.
And yet, Wood keeps selling.
AMD is riding the AI wave in 2026
To understand why this sale is turning heads, you first need to appreciate just how strong AMD’s business has become.
The company reported first-quarter 2026 results that were, by most measures, outstanding.
- Revenue climbed 38% year over year to $10.3 billion, blowing past the top of its own guidance range.
- Earnings grew more than 40%, and free cash flow more than tripled to a record $2.6 billion.
- Data center revenue hit a record $5.8 billion in the quarter, up 57% from the same period a year ago.
Data center sales were driven by two things working in tandem: surging demand for EPYC server processors and accelerating adoption of Instinct graphics processing units.
CEO Lisa Su told investors that every major cloud provider expanded its EPYC footprint during the quarter.
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Agentic AI, the kind where software agents autonomously complete complex tasks, requires enormous amounts of CPU compute for orchestration, data movement, and parallel processing. AMD’s EPYC chips are sitting right at the center of that demand surge.
Su also significantly raised AMD’s long-term server CPU market outlook. The chipmaker now expects that market to grow at more than 35% annually, reaching more than $120 billion by 2030.
“Based on the demand signals we are seeing today and the structural increase in CPU compute requirements driven by Agentic AI, we now expect the server CPU TAM to grow at greater than 35% annually, reaching over $120 billion by 2030,” said Su.
That is nearly double the forecast AMD gave investors at its Financial Analyst Day just months earlier in November 2025.
AMD deepened its partnership with Meta to deploy up to six gigawatts of Instinct GPUs across several product generations.
A previously announced deal with OpenAI is also progressing. Both partnerships include multi-year, large-scale commitments that give AMD unusual revenue visibility heading into 2027.
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Wood books profits on her biggest winner
According to a Benzinga report, on May 19, ARK Invest trimmed its AMD position across three of its exchange-traded funds. It sold shares from the ARK Innovation ETF, the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF, and the ARK Blockchain and Fintech Innovation ETF.
The combined sale of 38,529 shares totaled roughly $16.2 million at AMD’s closing price of $420.99 that day.
Related: AMD fires $10 billion shot at its main rival
It was not an isolated move.
ARK had sold AMD shares the previous Friday as well, Benzinga noted, and the firm has shed millions of dollars worth of the stock throughout May.
On May 18, ARK unloaded more than $28 million in AMD and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing stock, according to Benzinga.
The answer likely has less to do with AMD’s fundamentals and more to do with valuation discipline.
Wood has built ARK’s reputation on identifying early-stage disruptors and riding them to large gains. When those gains arrive, rotating profits into the next opportunity is consistent with that strategy.
What’s next for AMD stock?
AMD, near record highs and with Wall Street analysts still raising price targets, has a very different risk profile than it did two years ago.
AMD’s CEO recently met with Chinese officials in Beijing, a signal that the company is working to maintain access to one of the world’s largest semiconductor markets amid ongoing trade tensions.
Meanwhile, several analysts have lifted their price targets on AMD, citing the very same agentic AI demand tailwinds Su outlined on the earnings call.
Wood may simply be taking the gifts the market is offering right now.
For investors watching from the sidelines, the real story is not that Cathie Wood sold AMD.
It is that she held it long enough to sell $16 million worth at these prices, and AMD’s underlying business keeps getting stronger quarter after quarter.
Related: Cathie Wood buys $32 million of popular semiconductor stock
