AMD saw a data center surge in the first quarter as sales grew 57% compared to a year ago. AMD's PC chip business saw sales growth of 28%.
The chipmaker, which is playing catch up to Nvidia in AI infrastructure, reported first quarter earnings of $709 million, or 44 cents a share, on revenue of $7.4 billion, up 36% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 96 cents a share.
Wall Street was looking for first quarter AMD earnings of 93 cents a share on revenue of $7.12 billion.
CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the company's growth continued to accelerate due to "strength in our core businesses and expanding data center and AI momentum." She added that the company's outlook reflects the ability to navigate "the dynamic macro and regulatory environment." What’s unclear is whether tariffs accelerated buying of AI processors.
AMD data center business continues to shine in Q4
AMD said data center growth was driven by AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Instinct GPU sales. Client revenue was $2.3 billion in the quarter, up 68% from a year ago due to demand for Zen 5 AMD Ryzen processors. The company also closed the purchase of ZT Systems.
As for the outlook, AMD projected second quarter revenue of $7.4 billion, give or take $300 million.
AMD's Su noted that AMD's fifth-gen EPYC server chip is being adopted by multiple cloud providers including new instances at Alibaba, AWS, Google, Oracle and Tencent. "Enterprise adoption of EPYC instances was very strong in the quarter. The number of EPYC-powered cloud instances activated by Forbes 2000 enterprise customers more than doubled year-over-year, including new wins with internet-native streaming, transportation, financial services, and social media companies," said Su.
EPYC is now deployed by all of the top 10 telecom, aerospace, and semiconductor companies, 9 out of the top 10 automotive, 7 out of the top 10 manufacturing, and 6 out of the top 10 energy companies on the Forbes 2000.
On the AI business, Su said MI325X shipments are ramping and more than 35 MI300 series platforms are in production at service providers.
"We are actively working with multiple customers to scale Instinct from single-node deployments to distributed inferencing clusters. Training engagements also ramped in the quarter as multiple tier one hyperscale, AI, and enterprise customers scaled Instinct GPU clusters to train internal and next-gen frontier models," said Su. "In parallel, we're making meaningful progress with Sovereign AI deployments as countries expand investments to establish domestic, nation-scale AI infrastructure."
Looking forward, Su said MI350 series is garnering customer interest with second half deployments on tap. "Looking ahead, our MI400 series development remains on track to launch next year. The MI400 series is designed to deliver leadership performance for both inferencing and training, scaling seamlessly from single servers to full data center deployments. Early customer feedback has been very positive, marking a major step forward in our Instinct roadmap and significantly expanding our AI Accelerator TAM as customers plan broader Instinct deployments to power a larger share of their AI infrastructure," said Su.
AMD will hold an event June 12 with more details about the roadmap.
"While we face some headwinds from the dynamic macro and regulatory environments, including the recently announced export controls for Instinct MI308X shipments to China, we believe they are more than offset by the powerful tailwinds from our leadership product portfolio," said Su, who noted that AMD took out $700 million in revenue from the second quarter guidance due to the headwinds in China.
