AMD continues to ride EPYC, GPU data center waves

AMD is now a data center chip vendor in terms of revenue as the company handily topped first quarter expectations.

The chipmaker reported first quarter earnings of $1.4 billion, or 84 cents a share, on revenue of $10.3 billion, up 38% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.37 a share.

Wall Street was looking for AMD to report first quarter non-GAAP earnings of $1.29 a share on revenue of $9.92 billion.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company is "seeing strong momentum as inferencing and agentic AI drive increasing demand for high-performance CPUs and accelerators." Su added that "we expect server growth to accelerate meaningfully as we scale supply to meet demand" since customers were bullish on AMD's MI450 Series and Helios offerings.

By the numbers:

• Data center revenue in the first quarter was $5.8 billion, up 57% from a year ago. EPYC server chip demand was strong and shipments of the AMD Instinct GPU continued to ramp.
• PC and gaming revenue was $3.6 billion, up 23% from a year ago. The PC business made up for most of the growth and revenue total.
• Embedded revenue was $873 million, up 6% from a year ago.

For the second quarter, AMD is projecting revenue of $11.2 billion, give or take $300 million.

• AMD previews Instinct MI500 GPUs, physical AI, Helios integrated racks
• OpenAI, AMD ink big GPU deal: What it means for the rest of us
• Meta to deploy AMD GPUs, CPUs and take stake in chipmaker

On an earnings call, Su said the following:

• "Data center is now the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth. And as AI adoption scales, demand is increasing, not only for accelerators, but also for the high-performance CPUs that power and orchestrate those workloads."
• "Share gains accelerated year-over-year, reflecting the ramp of fifth-gen EPYC Turin CPUs and continued strength of fourth-gen EPYC processors across a wide range of workloads."
• "In Enterprise, demand accelerated with record revenue and record sell-through in the quarter. We expanded our customer base with new wins across financial services, health care, industrial and digital infrastructure companies, while also building momentum with mid-market and SMB customers."
• "As we approach production, demand for MI450 series GPUs continues to strengthen, with lead customer forecasts now exceeding our initial plans and a growing number of new customers engaging on large-scale deployments, including additional multi-gigawatt opportunities. With this expanded visibility, we have strong and increasing confidence in our ability to deliver tens of billions of dollars in annual Data Center AI revenue in 2027 and to exceed our long-term growth target of greater than 80% in the coming years."