AMD's Q4 data center, PC revenue drives results

AMD reported strong fourth quarter earnings that handily topped expectations as its data center revenue surged 39% from a year ago. 

The chipmaker reported fourth quarter earnings of $1.5 billion, or 92 cents a share, on revenue of $10.3 billion, up 34% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were $1.53 billion. 

Wall Street was looking for non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings of $1.32 a share on revenue of $9.67 billion. 

• AMD previews Instinct MI500 GPUs, physical AI, Helios integrated racks
• AMD sees big growth over next 3 to 5 years, AI boom continuing
• OpenAI, AMD ink big GPU deal: What it means for the rest of us
• IBM, AMD eye hybrid quantum computing, supercomputer architectures

AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company saw "accelerating adoption of our high-performance EPYC and Ryzen CPUs and the rapid scaling of our data center AI franchise."

The company said its fourth quarter benefited from "an approximate $360 million release of previously reserved AMD Instinct™ MI308 inventory and related charges." AMD reported China revenue of $390 million in the fourth quarter due to AMD Instinct MI308.

By the numbers:

• Data center revenue in the fourth quarter was $5.4 billion, up 39% from a year ago. AMD EPYC and Instinct GPU shipments drove demand. 
• PC and gaming revenue was $3.9 billion, up 37% from a year ago. Client business revenue surged 34% and gaming sales was up 50% from a year ago.
• Embedded revenue in the fourth quarter was $950 million, up 3% from a year ago. 
• For 2025, AMD reported earnings of $4.33 billion, or $2.65 a share, on revenue of $34.64 billion, up 34%. 

As for the outlook, AMD projected first quarter revenue of $9.8 billion, give or take $300 million. That projection includes $100 million of AMD Instinct MI308 sales to China. That guidance works out to first quarter revenue growth of 32% from a year ago.   

On a conference call with analysts, Su said the following:

• "In cloud, hyperscaler demand was very strong as North American customers expanded deployments. EPYC-powered public cloud offerings grew significantly in the quarter with AWS, Google and others launching more than 230 new AMD instances. Hyperscalers launched more than 500 AMD-based instances in 2025, increasing the number of EPYC cloud instances more than 50% year-over-year to nearly 1,600."
• "The leading server providers now offer more than 3,000 solutions powered by fourth and fifth gen EPYC CPUs that are optimized for all major enterprise workloads. As a result, the number of large businesses deploying EPYC on-prem more than doubled in 2025, and we exited the year with record server sell-through."
• "In the fourth quarter, hyperscalers expanded MI350 Series availability, leading AI companies scale their deployments to support additional workloads and multiple neocloud providers launched MI350 Series offerings that deliver on-demand access to instinct infrastructure in the cloud."
• "The MI450 Series development is going extremely well. So we're very happy with the progress that we have. We're right on track for a second half launch and beginning of production. And as it relates to sort of the shape of the ramp and the customer engagements, I would say the customer engagements continue to proceed very well. We have obviously a very strong relationship with OpenAI, and we're planning that ramp starting in the second half of the year going into 2027. That is on track. We're also working closely with a number of other customers who are very interested in ramping MI450 quickly."