AMD is becoming an AI chip company, just like Nvidia

AMD just announced its second quarter 2024 earnings today, and the highlight was this: nearly half the company’s sales are now data center products — not chips for personal computers, not game consoles, not embedded chips for industry or vehicles.

The company’s data center business has doubled in a single year, and this quarter’s growth was primarily due to a single chip: the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator, which competes with Nvidia’s infamously influential H100 AI chip. The AMD chip just did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter, according to CEO Lisa Su, up from its previous milestone of $1 billion cumulatively since its December 2023 debut. (AMD says its Epyc server CPUs also contributed.)

It looks like AMD is following a similar path to Nvidia itself, which has profited so phenomenally from the Nvidia H100 that it will now make new AI chips every year, accelerating all of its research and development to stay ahead, focusing its business on the product that’s so popular it can’t keep on shelves.

AMD, too, plans to release new AI chips every year: it has the MI325X coming in the fourth quarter of this year, the MI350 in 2025, and it plans to have the MI400 in 2026, the company reiterated today on its earnings call. Su said the MI350 should be “very competitive” with Nvidia’s Blackwell, which it revealed this March as “the world’s most powerful chip” for AI and recently began sampling to buyers.

As far as today’s MI300, Su says she’s still selling as many as AMD can make. Despite supply chain improvements, “supply will remain tight through 2025.”

Nvidia has a tremendous headstart over AMD, and despite doubling this year, AMD’s data center business is a tiny fraction of the size of Nvidia’s — $2.8 billion in a quarter vs. $22.6 billion in a quarter for Nvidia, which also just had record results in data center.

What does all this mean for PC gamers and others looking for new chips? It could be that the rising tide raises all boats — each new GPU architecture, funded by AI dollars, could be handed down for other tasks, yielding faster improvements than before. But in 2024, at least, the AI fervor seems to mean no new GPUs for gamers.

That said, AMD’s personal computing CPU and GPU businesses were up, not down, this past quarter. Ryzen CPUs were up 49 percent year over year and slightly up quarter over quarter, and while flagging PlayStation and Xbox sales made gaming revenue decline 59 percent, AMD said its Radeon 6000 GPUs actually increased sales year over year.

In case you’re wondering where all the AMD Zen 5 laptops are, AMD says there are more than 100 different “platforms” on track to ship with its Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” chips. While I think we’ve only seen the Asus ones hit shelves so far, plus a single HP announcement and an MSI preview, Su confirmed that Acer and Lenovo will have them, too.