Strong Q2 results and a bolder forward outlook
AMD reported second-quarter profits up 163% year over year on revenue of $11.5 billion, and guided to roughly $13 billion plus or minus $300 million for the third quarter. CEO Lisa Su told investors on the Q2 earnings call that the data-center business is positioned for significant growth in the second half of the year, with growth accelerating in 2027, and that data-center segment revenue is now expected to more than double year over year in 2027.
Why the share price still fell
Despite the beat and the multi-gigawatt Helios commitments from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, AMD's share price plunged about 10.5% after the results announcement and was trading roughly 8.7% below the opening price shortly after publication. The pullback reflects concern that much of AMD's growth across both CPUs and GPUs is tied to AI adoption by a small number of frontier-model customers whose profitability remains unproven.
Helios, MI400-series, and the push into agentic AI compute
At its Advancing AI event in San Francisco in July, AMD unveiled a rack-scale platform called Helios that packs 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs, each with 432 GB of HBM4 memory. The company is also targeting demand for CPUs to power agentic AI sandboxes with its Venice Epyc processors, which offer up to 256 cores and 512 threads, support 16 memory channels, and deliver up to 1.6 TB/s per socket. Su argued these products position AMD to benefit from server CPU, data-center AI, embedded, and PC tailwinds.
Concentration risk and a more crowded CPU market
Su acknowledged that large frontier-model customers OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta will consume AMD silicon through a number of cloud service providers, and that other interested buyers are typically operating at sub-gigawatt scale. Microsoft is another flagship customer, while Meta is reportedly exploring its own GPU cloud business. On the CPU side, AMD now faces Intel, Nvidia, Arm, Qualcomm, AWS, Google, and Microsoft, rather than the duopoly of prior years, even as embedded revenue rose 19% year over year to more than $977 million and client PC sales climbed 23% to $3.1 billion, with AMD warning that memory shortages could pressure PC sales in coming quarters.
Share this article
