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Why Did Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Stock Surge Today?

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Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD - Free Report) moved higher throughout morning trading hours on Tuesday, eventually hitting an intraday peak of $13.48—a 6% climb from Monday’s close—just before noon.

The move comes on the back of the chipmaker’s latest product announcement. On Tuesday, AMD unveiled its Embedded Radeon E9170 Series graphic processing unit, a GPU that is optimized for low-power embedded applications.

“The new AMD Embedded Radeon E9170 Series GPU not only achieves up to 3X the performance-per-watt over previous solutions, but is the first ‘Polaris’-based Embedded GPU available in the MCM form factor to enable sleek designs in a variety of sizes, striking the optimal balance of performance and power efficiency,” said Colin Cureton, director of product management at AMD Enterprise Solutions.

In its press release, AMD mentioned that the E9170 Series has a wide variety of applications. Of these, the chipmaker described how the new GPU could power digital casino games, thin clients, medical displays, retail signage, and industrial shock tests.

Investors are clearly bullish about AMD’s newest GPU, which is yet another example of the graphics chipmaker working to legitimize to its enterprise offerings. Expanding its enterprise GPU line—and competing against the likes of Nvidia (NVDA - Free Report) —is a key goal for AMD.

AMD’s graphics chips have seen increased demand from cryptocurrency mining, which has skyrocketed in popularity as the price of things like bitcoin and ethereum have grown. But the company itself has admitted that cryptocurrencies are not a long-term growth driver—making product announcements like today’s even more important.

Interestingly enough, the latest surge in AMD shares is also coming on the same day that short interest in the stock reached an all-time high. According to Business Insider and financial-analytics provider S3 Partners, AMD shares sold short rose to 159 million—a new record and an estimated 18% of total shares available.

Shorting AMD has not been a consistently profitable strategy this year, but after the stock’s 83% gain over the past 52 weeks, many investors are betting that the popular chipmaker will lose steam soon. As for now, AMD sports a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Want more stock market analysis from this author? Make sure to follow @Ryan_McQueeney on Twitter!

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