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Data centres are where AMD's profit lies

by on18 June 2024


AMD says there is gold in them thar hills 

AI computers might be stealing all the headlines, but AMD’s chief financial officer believes that their main source of profit is still data centres, with CPU cores being essential for many tasks.

Speaking to the gathered throngs at the Nasdaq Investor Conference in London last week, AMD’s Jean Hu responded to questions about the company’s plans for GPUs and AI computers.

Hu suggested that data centres will continue to be the biggest influence on AMD’s profits, despite challenges in other areas. “Data centres have been growing much faster than our other businesses. Despite a headwind on the embedded business side, we were able to improve gross margin,” she mentioned, referring to the first quarter of this year.

She expects the same trend in the second half of 2024 and believes it will be similar next year.

Discussing AI again, Hu highlighted AMD’s upcoming GPU accelerator, the MI325, which will have more memory and perform better than Nvidia’s current products. She also mentioned future products like the MI350 and MI400, which will compete with Nvidia’s upcoming releases.

Answering a question about traditional servers, Hu said that although the market is varied and declined last year, AMD has seen growth with its Gen 4 Epyc server CPU platforms. She claimed that AMD now holds a 33 percent market share against Intel.

Hu said that AMD’s latest server platforms can do the same work with fewer servers, reducing both capital expenditure and operating costs by 40 percent.

She emphasised that while AI-configured servers were getting a lot of attention, traditional workloads remain crucial.

Hu added CPUs were still the best choice for core applications like ERP systems, databases, and websites like Meta, Facebook, Instagram. She  noted that core counts are increasing across the industry.

Finally, when discussing competition with Intel in the business PC market, Hu said it requires a different strategy compared to consumer systems.

Last modified on 18 June 2024
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