AMD has shared its second quarter 2024 earnings and they reveal quite a shift in the company. Instead of AMD making most of its money from game consoles and PCs, as it has in the past, half the sales this year were from data centres.
The company has been a big player in the gaming and PC market for years. Every PlayStation and Xbox console as well as various handhelds are powered by AMD chips. Not to mention the GPU and desktop CPU division at AMD is also fairly big. However, AMD is seemingly becoming an AI company and there’s nothing it can do about it.
The financial report reveals that AMD’s MI300 AI chip did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter. Last quarter, both its data centre and desktop hardware only did $1 billion in the previous quarter combined.
Whether AMD wants to become an AI powerhouse isn’t up to the company it seems. The world is simply in demand for these chips. As a result, AMD plans on releasing new AI chips every year. Keep in mind that NVIDIA is doing the same thing now.
AMD says it will launch the MI325X in the upcoming fourth quarter and the MI359 in 2025. There’s also the MI4000 in 2026. Of course, AMD is going up against NVIDIA here and the company plans to approach its data centre division the same way it has its GPUs.
This means AMD will launch competitive options to NVIDIA’s Blackwell hardware. AMD says the company is selling as many chips as it can make right now and there are various supply chain constraints given the high demand. AMD’s CEO Lisa Su says that supply will remain tight through 2025.
AMD is a small portion of the AI industry right now but it has the potential to grow. The company entered the scene quite late too. At the moment, NVIDIA’s AI data centre business is valued at $22.6 billion over AMD at $2.8 billion.
AMD plans to take more revenue thanks to its competitive chips that come in cheaper than NVIDIA. This is a similar situation for its desktop GPUs versus NVIDIA and CPUs versus Intel.
Speaking of which, AMD says its CPU and GPU business grew in the second quarter of the year. Ryzen CPU sales were up 49% year over year. AMD says that even with the dip in PlayStation and Xbox console sales of 59%, its gaming divisions saw an increase with Radeon 6000 sales spiking.
AMD doesn’t plan to release new GPUs in 2024. While NVIDIA hasn’t confirmed its 50-series lineup yet, all reports say they will arrive before the end of 2024. AMD, however, is working on its Zen 5 notebooks. The company says that over 100 models across various brands are planned at this rate. They will include the new Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point chips.
