New York, Feb 18, 2026, 17:29 (EST) — After-hours
- Advanced Micro Devices shares fell 1.5% to $200.12, lagging a broader tech-led rise.
- A company filing disclosed a $75 mln performance equity award for CEO Lisa Su and 2025 cash bonuses for top executives.
- Another filing showed CFO Jean Hu sold about 20,000 shares under a pre-arranged trading plan.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) shares closed down 1.5% at $200.12 on Wednesday, and were last little changed in after-hours trading, after investors digested fresh disclosures on executive pay and insider transactions.
The moves mattered because the market has been trading the AI-chip winners and losers tick by tick, and governance headlines can still move sentiment when valuations are tight. On a day when investors rewarded Nvidia, AMD didn’t catch much of that bid.
U.S. stocks finished higher, with the S&P 500 up 0.56% and the Nasdaq up 0.78%, as megacap tech steadied after a choppy stretch. “At a certain point, weakness in tech was bound to bring in the marginal buyer,” Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird, said. (Reuters)
Nvidia (NVDA.O) climbed after it said it signed a multiyear deal to sell Meta Platforms millions of its current and future AI chips, including CPUs that compete with products from Intel and AMD. “It actually continues down that path and makes it an excellent data center-only CPU,” Nvidia hyperscale and high-performance computing chief Ian Buck said of the company’s next-generation Vera processor. (Reuters)
AMD’s own filings gave traders plenty to chew on. The chipmaker said its board approved a $3.13 mln annual cash bonus for CEO Lisa Su for fiscal 2025 and disclosed a one-time, long-term equity award with a target value of $75 mln, tied to stock-price hurdles through March 2031. The award is set to be granted on March 15, the filing said, and can pay out from 0% to 200% of target depending on the hurdles reached. (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)
A separate Form 4 filing showed CFO Jean Hu sold 19,956 AMD shares on Feb. 17 at weighted-average prices generally between about $197 and $205, for proceeds of roughly $4.0 mln based on the reported averages. The filing said the sales were made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan — a pre-arranged trading plan companies use to set up sales in advance — adopted on Aug. 22, 2025. (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)
Investors are also watching AMD’s AI roadmap closely. AMD executive Anush Elangovan, a corporate vice president in software development, pushed back on a report suggesting delays to the company’s next-generation MI455X ramp, writing on X: “Well, your assessment is still wrong… On target for 2H 2026.” (Tom’s Hardware)
Still, the risk case is straightforward: if Nvidia’s push into standalone data-center CPUs and rack-scale systems accelerates, it could squeeze the window for AMD to expand in the same budgets. Any slip in AMD’s system timelines — or slower customer rollouts — would likely show up quickly in order expectations.
Next up, traders will key on Nvidia’s results and outlook on Feb. 25, a read-through moment for AI infrastructure demand that tends to drag the whole chip group with it. (Nvidia)
