Lisa Su holds up the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, an A.I. developer platform, during AMD’s keynote at CES 2026 on Jan. 5, 2026. Caroline Brehman / AFP via Getty Images
At CES 2026, AMD CEO Lisa Su used the industry’s biggest stage to outline where the next era of A.I. is headed. The A.I. industry, she said during her keynote yesterday (Jan. 5), is entering the era of “yotta-scale computing,” driven by unprecedented growth in both training and inference. The constraint, Su argued, is no longer the model itself but the computational foundation beneath it.
“Since the launch of ChatGPT a few years ago, we’ve gone from about a million people using A.I. to more than a billion active users,” Su said. “We see A.I. adoption growing to over five billion active users as it becomes indispensable to every part of our lives, just like the cell phone and the internet today.”
Global A.I. compute capacity, she noted, is now on a path from zettaflops toward yottaflops within the next five years. A yottaflop is 1 followed by 24 zeros. “Ten yottaflops is 10,000 times more computing power than we had in 2022. There has never been anything like this in the history of computing, because there has never been a technology like A.I.,” Su said.
Yet Su cautioned that the industry still lacks the computing power required to support what A.I. will ultimately enable. AMD’s response, she said, is to build the foundation end-to-end—positioning the company as an architect of the next A.I. phase rather than a supplier of isolated components.
That strategy centers on Helios, a rack-scale data center platform designed for trillion-parameter A.I. training and large-scale inference. A single Helios rack delivers up to three A.I. exaflops, integrating Instinct MI455X accelerators, EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking and the ROCm software ecosystem. The emphasis is on durability at scale, with systems built to grow alongside A.I. workloads rather than locking customers into closed, short-lived architectures.
AMD also previewed the Instinct MI500 Series, slated for launch in 2027. Built on next-generation CDNA 6 architecture, the roadmap targets up to a thousandfold increase in A.I. performance compared with the MI300X GPUs introduced in 2023.
Su stressed that yotta-scale computing will not be confined to data centers. A.I., she said, is becoming a local, everyday experience for billions of users. AMD announced an expansion of its on-device A.I. push with Ryzen AI Max+ platforms, capable of supporting models with up to 128 billion parameters using unified memory.
Beyond commercial products, Su tied AMD’s roadmap to public-sector priorities. Joined on stage by Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science and technology advisor, who is slated to speak at CES later this week, she discussed the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission, a public-private initiative aimed at strengthening national A.I. leadership. As part of that effort, AMD-powered supercomputers Lux and Discovery are coming online at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reinforcing the company’s role in scientific discovery and national infrastructure.
The keynote closed with a $150 million commitment to A.I. education, aligned with the U.S. A.I. Literacy Pledge—signaling that, in AMD’s view, sustaining yotta-scale ambition will depend as much on talent development as on silicon.
AMD is kicking off CES 2026 on Monday, where it’ll cover its latest AI developments and perhaps show off its newest Ryzen chips. The company will outline the full scope of its vision for AI implementations across the full spectrum of consumer and enterprise applications. The presentation — which is the lead keynote for CES 2026 — will be led by CEO Dr. Lisa Su.
We’ll tell you how to tune in to the livestream and what else you can expect to see.
How to watch AMD’s keynote live
Dr. Su will deliver a keynote speech from the Palazzo Ballroom at the Venetian on Monday, January 5 at 9:30PM ET (6:30PM PT). You can watch the event live on the CES YouTube channel (we’ve embedded the livestream below).
What to expect
While AMD says it’s keeping its product details under wraps, we can expect “updates on AI solutions, from cloud to enterprise, edge and devices.”
It’s also likely that AMD will unveil its new versions of the Ryzen chips during its keynote on Monday, as Su will talk about the “advancements driven by Ryzen CPUs.” That could include the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is expected to have better single-threaded performance. Additionally, we can expect to see the Ryzen 9000G series, which is potentially built with AMD’s Zen 5 architecture.
Regarding AI, AMD could further discuss its new FSR Redstone technology, which it previously previewed on December 10. AMD’s upscaling tech aims to close the gap on NVIDIA’s DLSS 4, which was announced during CES 2025.
Su’s presentation caps off CES’s press day, so she’ll be taking the stage in the hours after rivals NVIDIA and Intel present their chipmaking and AI plans to the world. As a reminder of how cross-linked these companies have become: OpenAI has pledged billions of dollars of hardware orders to AMD, while rival NVIDIA has invested billions in OpenAI — and taken a stake worth billions in Intel, too.
AMD is kicking off on Monday, where it’ll cover its latest AI developments and perhaps show off its newest Ryzen chips. The company will outline the full scope of its vision for AI implementations from across the full spectrum of consumer and enterprise applications. The presentation — which is the for CES 2026 — will be led by CEO Dr. Lisa Su.
We’ll tell you how to tune in to the livestream and what else you can expect to see.
How to watch AMD’s keynote live
Dr. Su will deliver a keynote speech from the Palazzo Ballroom at the Venetian on Monday, January 5 at 9:30PM ET (6:30PM PT). You can watch the event live on the (we’ve embedded the livestream below).
What to expect
While AMD says it’s keeping its product details , we can expect “updates on AI solutions, from cloud to enterprise, edge and devices.”
It’s also likely that AMD will unveil its new versions of the Ryzen chips during its keynote on Monday, as Su will talk about the “advancements driven by Ryzen CPUs.” That could include the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is expected to have . Additionally, we can expect to see the Ryzen 9000G series, which is potentially built with AMD’s Zen 5 architecture.
Regarding AI, AMD could further discuss its new technology, which it previously previewed on December 10. AMD’s upscaling tech aims to close the gap on NVIDIA’s DLSS 4, which was announced during CES 2025.
Su’s presentation caps off CES’s press day, so she’ll be taking the stage in the hours after rivals and Intel present their chipmaking and AI bona plans to the world.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research’s head of technology research, said in a recent program on CNBC that while he likes Intel’s leadership, he cannot recommend the stock. Here is what the analyst said:
“Lip-Bu Tan—we’re big fans. We’ve known him before, and he’s somebody people like and people want to work with. Give him a chance. There’s some speculation around him even working with AMD because we know he’s tight with Lisa Su, who’s a great CEO in her own right. Intel Corp (NASDAQ:INTC)—we’re watching. We’ve seen this surge here. It might take a rest for a little while because I don’t think the numbers are there near term. But with the backing of the US government, which I think was a really nice move by the Trump administration, you can’t count them out. You can’t count them out, but they really don’t have an AI strategy that’s as visible as the others that we recommend.”
Ben Reitzes said he’s recommending Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD.
While we acknowledge the potential of INTC as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and AMD’s Lisa Su testify before the Senate on May 08, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Nvidia may be dominating the graphics processing unit (GPU) market right now, but its closest rival, AMD, is catching up. Today, (Oct. 6), AMD announced a landmark collaboration with OpenAI that mirrors a recent deal between OpenAI and Nvidia. Under the agreement, AMD will deploy six gigawatts of computing power to OpenAI, which will in turn have the option to acquire up to 10 percent of AMD’s stock—a stake worth roughly $33 billion now after the announcement sent AMD shares to soar 24 percent.
The partnership gives OpenAI a critical boost in computing resources as it continues to roll out new A.I. models and tools. “This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize A.I.’s full potential,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
OpenAI’s first one-gigawatt deployment is scheduled for the second half of 2026 and will use AMD’s MI450 chips. This initial rollout will coincide with a vesting schedule of AMD stock for OpenAI, allowing OpenAI to acquire up to 160 million shares as deployments scale to six gigawatts. The stock grant will vest based on OpenAI hitting technical and commercial milestones. The full deal will only be executed if AMD’s stock reaches $600 per share. AMD shares are currently traded at $204 apiece.
The AMD partnership is the latest in a string of blockbuster A.I. deals. Nvidia recently announced its own long-term pact with OpenAI, pledging up to $100 billion in investments over the next decade. In return, OpenAI will obtain as much as 10 gigawatts of computing power from Nvidia’s systems.
Global venture capital funding rose 38 percent year-over-year to $97 billion in the third quarter, according to Crunchbase, with nearly half of that money flowing into A.I. ventures. Analysts say the current boom evokes the early days of the internet.
“We still believe we are in the early innings of this spending cycle,” said Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, in a client note. AMD’s new deal with OpenAI marks a “1996 moment” for the tech world, he added, likening today’s A.I. momentum to the foundational years of the tech economy.
Nvidia’s shares slipped more than 1 percent today following AMD’s announcement, but the company still holds a commanding lead with more than 90 percent of the global GPU market. Nvidia’s early success in meeting A.I.-fueled GPU demand has propelled its market cap to $4.5 trillion and fueled $41 billion in data center revenue between May and July. AMD, in comparison, has a market cap of $334 billion and brought in $3.2 billion in data center revenue in its most recent quarter.
Lisa Su, who has led AMD as CEO since 2014, is confident that the OpenAI deal will accelerate that growth. Her company has a “clear line of sight” to achieve tens of billions of dollars in data center revenue by 2027, Su told analysts today, adding that these numbers could grow even higher. “In addition to the OpenAI opportunity, and the very significant revenue addition there, we expect to generate well over $100 billion in the next several years,” she said.
NEW YORK (AP) — The typical compensation package for chief executives who run companies in the S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% in 2024 as the stock market enjoyed another banner year and corporate profits rose sharply.
Many companies have heeded calls from shareholders to tie CEO compensation more closely to performance. As a result, a large proportion of pay packages consist of stock awards, which the CEO often can’t cash in for years, if at all, unless the company meets certain targets, typically a higher stock price or market value or improved operating profits.
The Associated Press’ CEO compensation survey, which uses data analyzed for The AP by Equilar, included pay data for 344 executives at S&P 500 companies who have served at least two full consecutive fiscal years at their companies, which filed proxy statements between Jan. 1 and April 30.
Here are the key takeaways from the survey:
A good year at the top
The median pay package for CEOs rose to $17.1 million, up 9.7%. Meanwhile, the median employee at companies in the survey earned $85,419, reflecting a 1.7% increase year over year.
CEOs had to navigate sticky inflation and relatively high interest rates last year, as well as declining consumer confidence. But the economy also provided some tail winds: Consumers kept spending despite their misgivings about the economy; inflation did subside somewhat; the Fed lowered interest rates; and the job market stayed strong.
The stock market’s main benchmark, the S&P 500, rose more than 23% last year. Profits for companies in the index rose more than 9%.
“2024 was expected to be a strong year, so the (nearly) 10% increases are commensurate with the timing of the pay decisions,” said Dan Laddin, a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners.
Sarah Anderson, who directs the Global Economy Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, said there have been some recent “long-overdue” increases in worker pay, especially for those at the bottom of the wage scale. But she said too many workers in the world’s richest countries still struggle to pay their bills.
The top earners
Rick Smith, the founder and CEO of Axon Enterprises, topped the survey with a pay package valued at $164.5 million. Axon, which makes Taser stun guns and body cameras, saw revenue grow more than 30% for three straight years and posted record annual net income of $377 million in 2024. Axon’s shares more than doubled last year after rising more than 50% in 2023.
General Electric Co. CEO Lawrence Culp Jr. signs a $52 billion deal by Emirates to purchase Boeing aircraft with GE engines, at the Dubai Air Show, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Monday, Nov. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Lujain Jo)
General Electric Co. CEO Lawrence Culp Jr. signs a $52 billion deal by Emirates to purchase Boeing aircraft with GE engines, at the Dubai Air Show, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Monday, Nov. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Lujain Jo)
Almost all of Smith’s pay package consists of stock awards, which he can only receive if the company meets targets tied to its stock price and operations for the period from 2024 to 2030. Companies are required to assign a value to the stock awards when they are granted.
Other top earners in the survey include Lawrence Culp, CEO of what is now GE Aerospace ($87.4 million), Tim Cook at Apple ($74.6 million), David Gitlin at Carrier Global ($65.6 million) and Ted Sarandos at Netflix ($61.9 million). The bulk of those pay packages consisted of stock or options awards.
The median stock award rose almost 15% last year compared to a 4% increase in base salaries, according to Equilar.
Tim Cook attends the WSJ. Magazine Innovators Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
Tim Cook attends the WSJ. Magazine Innovators Awards at the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
“For CEOs, target long-term incentives consistently increase more each year than salaries or bonuses,” said Melissa Burek, also a partner at Compensation Advisory Partners. “Given the significant role that long-term incentives play in executive pay, this trend makes sense.”
Jackie Cook at Morningstar Sustainalytics said the benefit of tying CEO pay to performance is “that share-based pay appears to provide a clear market signal that most shareholders care about.” But she notes that the greater use of share-based pay has led to a “phenomenal rise” in CEO compensation “tracking recent years’ market performance,” which has “widened the pay gap within workplaces.”
Some well-known billionaire CEOs are low in the AP survey. Warren Buffett’s compensation was valued at $405,000, about five times what a worker at Berkshire Hathaway makes. According to Tesla’s proxy, Elon Musk received no compensation for 2024, but in 2018 he was awarded a multiyear package that has been valued at $56 billion and is the subject of a court battle.
Other notable CEOs didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion the survey. Starbucks’ Brian Niccol received a pay package valued at $95.8 million, but he only took over as CEO on Sept. 9. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang saw his compensation grow to $49.9 million, but the company filed its proxy after April 30.
The pay gap
At half the companies in AP’s annual pay survey, it would take the worker at the middle of the company’s pay scale 192 years to make what the CEO did in one. Companies have been required to disclose this so-called pay ratio since 2018.
The pay ratio tends to be highest at companies in industries where wages are typically low. For instance, at cruise line company Carnival Corp., its CEO earned nearly 1,300 times the median pay of $16,900 for its workers. McDonald’s CEO makes about 1,000 times what a worker making the company’s median pay does. Both companies have operations that span numerous countries.
Overall, wages and benefits netted by private-sector workers in the U.S. rose 3.6% through 2024, according to the Labor Department. The average worker in the U.S. makes $65,460 a year. That figure rises to $92,000 when benefits such as health care and other insurance are included.
“With CEO pay continuing to climb, we still have an enormous problem with excessive pay gaps,” Anderson said. “These huge disparities are not only unfair to lower-level workers who are making significant contributions to company value – they also undercut enterprise effectiveness by lowering employee morale and boosting turnover rates.”
Some gains for female CEOs
This photo provided by Otis Elevator Co. shows CEO Judy Marks. (via AP)
This photo provided by Otis Elevator Co. shows CEO Judy Marks. (via AP)
For the 27 women who made the AP survey — the highest number dating back to 2014 — median pay rose 10.7% to $20 million. That compares to a 9.7% increase to $16.8 million for their male counterparts.
The highest earner among female CEOs was Judith Marks of Otis Worldwide, with a pay package valued at $42.1 million. The company, known for its elevators and escalators, has had operating profit above $2 billion for four straight years. About $35 million of Marks’ compensations was in the form of stock awards.
Other top earners among female CEOs were Jane Fraser of Citigroup ($31.1 million), Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices ($31 million), Mary Barra at General Motors ($29.5 million) and Laura Alber at Williams-Sonoma ($27.7 million).
FILEw – Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup, speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing to examine Wall Street firms on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILEw – Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup, speaks during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee oversight hearing to examine Wall Street firms on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, arrives for a dinner at the Elysee Palace, during an event on the sidelines of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, arrives for a dinner at the Elysee Palace, during an event on the sidelines of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)
Christy Glass, a professor of sociology at Utah State University who studies equity, inclusion and leadership, said while there may be a few more women on the top paid CEO list, overall equity trends are stagnating, particularly as companies cut back on DEI programs.
“There are maybe a couple more names on the list, but we’re really not moving the needle significantly,” she said.
FILE- Mary Barra, chair and CEO of General Motors, talks to David Rubenstein during an interview hosted by the Economic Club of Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)
FILE- Mary Barra, chair and CEO of General Motors, talks to David Rubenstein during an interview hosted by the Economic Club of Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough, File)
Prioritizing security
Equilar found that a larger number of companies are offering security perquisites as part of executive compensation packages, possibly in reaction to the December shooting of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.
Equilar said an analysis of 208 companies in the S&P 500 that filed proxy statements by April 2 showed that the median spending on security rose to $94,276 last year from $69,180 in 2023.
Among the companies that increased their security perks were Centene, which provides health care services to Medicare and Medicaid, and the chipmaker Intel.
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Reporters Matt Ott and Chris Rugaber in Washington contributed.
AMD launched a new artificial-intelligence chip on Thursday that is taking direct aim at Nvidia’s data center graphics processors, known as GPUs.
The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD’s AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia’s products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year.
Advanced generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT requires massive data centers full of GPUs in order to do the necessary processing, which has created demand for more companies to provide AI chips.
In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.
“AI demand has actually continued to take off and actually exceed expectations. It’s clear that the rate of investment is continuing to grow everywhere,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the event.
AMD didn’t reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server.
With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom for AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD’s 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.
The MI325X’s rollout will pit it against Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia has said will start shipping in significant quantities early next year.
A successful launch for AMD’s newest data center GPU could draw interest from investors that are looking for additional companies that are in line to benefit from the AI boom. AMD is only up 20% so far in 2024 while Nvidia’s stock is up over 175%. Most industry estimates say Nvidia has over 90% of the market for data center AI chips.
AMD stock fell 3% during trading on Thursday.
AMD’s biggest obstacle in taking market share is that its rival’s chips use their own programming language, CUDA, which has become standard among AI developers. That essentially locks developers into Nvidia’s ecosystem.
In response, AMD this week said that it has been improving its competing software, called ROCm, so that AI developers can more easily switch more of their AI models over to AMD’s chips, which it calls accelerators.
AMD has framed its AI accelerators as more competitive for use cases where AI models are creating content or making predictions rather than when an AI model is processing terabytes of data to improve. That’s partially due to the advanced memory AMD is using on its chip, it said, which allows it to server Meta’s Llama AI model faster than some Nvidia chips.
“What you see is that MI325 platform delivers up to 40% more inference performance than the H200 on Llama 3.1,” said Su, referring to Meta’s large-language AI model.
Taking on Intel, too
While AI accelerators and GPUs have become the most intensely watched part of the semiconductor industry, AMD’s core business has been central processors, or CPUs, that lay at the heart of nearly every server in the world.
AMD’s data center sales during the June quarter more than doubled in the past year to $2.8 billion, with AI chips accounting for only about $1 billion, the company said in July.
AMD takes about 34% of total dollars spent on data center CPUs, the company said. That’s still less than Intel, which remains the boss of the market with its Xeon line of chips. AMD is aiming to change that with a new line of CPUs, called EPYC 5th Gen, that it also announced on Thursday.
Those chips come in a number of different configurations ranging from a low-cost and low-power 8-core chip that costs $527 to 192-core, 500-watt processors intended for supercomputers that cost $14,813 per chip.
The new CPUs are particularly good for feeding data into AI workloads, AMD said. Nearly all GPUs require a CPU on the same system in order to boot up the computer.
“Today’s AI is really about CPU capability, and you see that in data analytics and a lot of those types of applications,” Su said.
Both Lisa Su and Jensen Huang spoke at Computex 2024 in Taipei this week. Photos by I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images and SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images
Jensen Huang and Lisa Su have a lot in common. In addition to their respective positions as CEOs of chipmakers Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), the two are both first-generation Americans hailing from the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan and are even distant cousins. As industry leaders in semiconductor manufacturing, they have also in recent years become key players amid the artificial intelligence (A.I.) boom. Huang and Su laid out their company roadmaps for the next generations of A.I. chips while taking the stage at Computex 2024, an annual tech trade show held in Taipei, Taiwan. Nvidia and AMD made a name for themselves with graphics processing units (GPUs) powering data centers that run generative A.I. models like OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini.
Yesterday (June 2), before the conference officially kicked off, Huang announced a new A.I. chip platform called “Rubin,” expected to roll out in 2026. The announcement came less than three months after Nvidia unveiled its next-generation A.I. chip Blackwell, which has yet to hit the market. “I’m not sure whether I’m going to regret this or not. We have code names in our company and we try to keep them very secret—oftentimes most of our employees don’t even know,” Huang said. Rubin is named after the U.S. astronomer Vera Rubin.
Both Blackwell and Rubin are in full development, said Huang, who noted they will be produced on a “one-year rhythm.” Blackwell will be made available later this year alongside the Blackwell Ultra in 2025 and the Rubin Ultra in 2027.
“The pace of product releases from Nvidia is jaw-dropping, not just because the products are so incredible but also because they’re launching or announcing new products every six months when it used to be that the standard was 12 to 18 months,” Cory Johnson, chief market strategist at Futurum Group, told Observer. “Everyone else is playing catch-up, including AMD.”
How AMD plans to catch up with Nvidia
Huang gave his presentation solo, joined only by a group of robots as he discussed his vision for “physical A.I.” as the next wave of the technology—one that will see A.I.-powered robots able to work among humans. During her keynote today, Su brought out a series of AMD partners including Microsoft Windows chief Pavan Davuluri and HP CEO Enrique Lores before she divulged details on AMD’s A.I. chip timeline.
Like Nvidia, AMD plans to develop new A.I. processors on an “annual cadence.” Following the launch of MI300X last year, the company in the fourth quarter of 2024 will make available its successor MI325X, which Su described as faster and offering more memory. This will be followed by the MI350 in 2025 and MI400 series in 2026. “It’s just so clear that the demand for A.I. is accelerating so much going forward,” said Su. “We’re really just at the beginning of a decade-long megacycle for A.I.”
Nvidia, which accounts for around 70 percent of A.I. semiconductor sales, has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion, while AMD’s measures at around $264 billion. Nvidia’s success has made Huang the world’s 14th wealthiest person with an estimated net worth of $99.8 billion. Su, meanwhile, has for five consecutive years been ranked the highest-paid female CEO in the U.S.
Their recent announcements indicate a turning point in the tech industry, according to Johnson. “The pace of innovation is faster, and specifically the pace of product releases,” he said, adding that the developments are all the more impressive coming from Huang and Su. “It’s a pretty amazing thing, this day in the history of the world, to look up and see two Americans who were born in Taiwan leading innovation, really changing the world—and back in Taiwan talking about it.”
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) has become one of the more notable comeback stories in recent years. Left for dead in the middle of the last decade, it has become a leader in CPU, GPU, and embedded chips under the leadership of CEO Lisa Su.
With it making advancements in the AI field, AMD stock is on an upward trajectory, rising 127% in 2023. However, determining whether the semiconductor stock can mint millionaires from here requires a closer look.
The state of AMD
AMD stock has benefited from a tremendous level of success under Su and has the potential to go much higher. When Su took over in 2014, she limited the company’s focus to CPUs and GPUs. Since product development timelines in the semiconductor industry take at least three years, Su’s vision took time to bear fruit.
Nonetheless, in that time, the company’s CPUs surpassed the performance of those of longtime rival Intel. In the GPU field, it won contracts to power Sony‘s PlayStation and Microsoft‘s Xbox. Additionally, its GPUs have helped it gain traction on Nvidia in some cases, and helped its data center technologies take market share from Intel.
Moreover, just when it looked like Nvidia would dominate AI chips, AMD released its Instinct MI300A accelerator chip and the MI300X GPU, which AMD claims is a faster chip than Nvidia’s H100.
These new offerings have stoked investor optimism, taking the semiconductor stock to 52-week highs in late December. Over the last year, AMD stock has more than doubled.
Why minting millionaires from here may be a struggle
Unfortunately, turning small investors into millionaires would take a level of growth beyond the imaginations of many. With AMD’s recovery, its market cap has reached almost $220 billion, taking it into mega-cap status.
If an investor bought $10,000 worth of AMD stock today, the market cap would have to reach nearly $22 trillion for that position to become $1 million. Currently, the stock with the highest market cap, Apple, has a market cap of around $3 trillion, less than one-seventh that amount.
Also, AMD’s financials would have to make considerable improvements to send the stock into hyperdrive. In the third quarter of 2023, its revenue of $5.8 billion grew 4% year over year, compared with a 9% yearly decline for revenue in the first three quarters of the year.
AMD’s revenue growth should improve. Still, even if it can find a way to match Nvidia’s 206% revenue growth in its third quarter of fiscal 2023 (ended Oct. 29), it will likely not make recent investors with only a few thousand to invest into millionaires .
Millionaire status is more reachable for large investors who bought the stock on Oct. 8, 2014, the day Su became AMD’s CEO. If you’d started a $10,000 position then, it would be worth approximately $414,000 today, meaning if the stock jumps another 127% in 2024, those investors’ original investment would be close to $1 million.
AMD as a millionaire maker
Although AMD can probably help an investor make money on the road to becoming a millionaire, it has probably grown too large to accomplish that feat on its own for small investors. As a mega-cap stock, it is unlikely to achieve the 100-fold or more increases needed to turn $10,000 into $1 million.
Nonetheless, AMD’s performance has far exceeded that of the indexes during Su’s time at the company. Given past successes, that trend is likely to continue. Hence, even if one cannot become a millionaire, an investor could become significantly richer with a long-term investment in AMD stock.
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(Bloomberg) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc., taking aim at a burgeoning market dominated by Nvidia Corp., unveiled new so-called accelerator chips that it said will be able to run artificial intelligence software faster than rival products.
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The company introduced a long-anticipated lineup called the MI300 at an event Wednesday held in San Jose, California. Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su also gave an eye-popping forecast for the size of the AI chip industry, saying it could climb to more than $400 billion in the next four years. That’s more than twice as high as a projection AMD gave in August, showing how rapidly expectations are changing for AI hardware.
The launch is one of the most important in AMD’s five-decade history, setting up a showdown with Nvidia in the red-hot market for AI accelerators. Such chips help develop AI models by bombarding them with data, a task they handle more adeptly than traditional computer processors.
Building AI systems that rival human intelligence — considered the holy grail of computing — is now within reach, Su said in an interview. But deployment of the technology is still only just beginning. It will take time to assess the impact on productivity and other aspects of the economy, she said.
“The truth is we’re so early,” Su said. “This is not a fad. I believe it.”
AMD is showing increasing confidence that the MI300 lineup can win over some of the biggest names in technology, potentially diverting billions in spending toward the company. Customers using the processors will include Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc., AMD said.
Nvidia shares dropped 2.3% to $455.03 in New York on Wednesday, a sign investors see the new chip as a threat. Still, AMD shares didn’t see a commensurate increase. On a day when tech stocks were generally down, the shares fell 1.3% to $116.82.
Surging demand for Nvidia chips by data center operators helped propel that company’s shares this year, sending its market value past $1.1 trillion. The big question is how long it will essentially have the accelerator market to itself.
AMD sees an opening: Large language models — used by AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT — need a huge amount of computer memory, and that’s where the chipmaker believes it has an advantage.
The new AMD chip has more than 150 billion transistors and 2.4 times as much memory as Nvidia’s H100, the current market leader. It also has 1.6 as much memory bandwidth, further boosting performance, AMD said.
Su said that the new chip is equal to Nvidia’s H100 in its ability to train AI software and much better at inference — the process of running that software once it’s ready for real-world use.
While the company expressed confidence in its product’s performance, Su said it won’t just be a competition between two companies. Many others will vie for market share too.
At the same time, Nvidia is developing its own next-generation chips. The H100 will be succeeded by the H200 in the first half of next year, giving access to a new high-speed type of memory. That should match at least some of what AMD’s offering. And then Nvidia is expected to come out with a whole new architecture for the processor later in the year.
AMD’s prediction that AI processors will grow into a $400 billion market underscores the boundless optimism in the artificial intelligence industry. That compares with $597 billion for the entire chip industry in 2022, according to IDC.
As recently as August, AMD had offered a more modest forecast of $150 billion over the same period. But it will take the company a while to grab a large piece of that market. AMD has said that its own revenue from accelerators will top $2 billion in 2024, with analysts estimating that the chipmaker’s total sales will reach about $26.5 billion.
The chips are based on the type of semiconductors called graphics processing units, or GPUs, which have typically been used by video gamers to get the most realistic experience. Their ability to perform a certain type of calculation rapidly by doing many of computations simultaneously has made them the go-to choice for training AI software.
(Updates with CEO’s comments starting in fifth paragraph.)
Lisa Su displays an AMD Instinct MI300 chip as she delivers a keynote address at CES 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Jan. 4, 2023
David Becker | Getty Images
Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event on Wednesday they will use AMD’s newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X. It’s the biggest sign so far that technology companies are searching for alternatives to the expensive Nvidia graphics processors which have been essential for creating and deploying artificial intelligence programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
If AMD’s latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models, and put competitive pressure on Nvidia’s surging AI chip sales growth.
“All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on Wednesday.
AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models.
At an event for analysts on Wednesday, CEO Lisa Su directly compared its Instinct MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia’s main AI GPU, the H100.
“What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience,” Su said. “When you ask a model something, you’d like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated.”
The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. “It takes work to adopt AMD,” Su said.
AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia’s industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons why AI developers currently prefer Nvidia.
Price will also be important — AMD didn’t reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia’s can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD’s chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia in order to convince customers to buy it.
AMD MI300X accelerator for artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia.
Meta said that it will use Instinct MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads like processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott said it would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle‘s cloud will also use the chips.
OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products called Triton, which isn’t a big large language model like GPT, but is used in AI research to access chip features.
AMD isn’t yet forecasting massive sales for the chip yet, only projecting about $2 billion in total data center GPU revenue in 2024. Nvidia reported over $14 billion in data center sales in the most recent quarter alone, although that metric includes other chips beside GPUs.
However, AMD says that the total market for AI GPUs could climb to $400 billion over the next four years, doubling the company’s previous projection, showing how high expectations and how coveted high-end AI chips have become — and why the company is now focusing investor attention on the product line. Su also suggested to reporters that AMD doesn’t think that it needs to beat Nvidia to do well in the market.
“I think it’s clear to say that Nvidia has to be the vast majority of that right now,” Su told reporters, referring to the AI chip market. “We believe it could be $400-billion-plus in 2027. And we could get a nice piece of that.”
(Bloomberg) — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said a new AI chip will generate $2 billion in sales next year, fueling optimism that demand for the component will offset a slump in orders for video-game equipment.
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The company’s MI300 processor, which will compete with Nvidia Corp. products in the market for artificial intelligence accelerators, is set to begin shipping in the coming weeks, AMD said during a post-earnings conference call Tuesday.
The chip has received strong early orders, including from large cloud computing customers. It should bring in $400 million in revenue this quarter, on the way toward generating $2 billion for the whole of 2024, AMD said. In fact, it’s on course to be the fastest-ever AMD product to reach $1 billion in sales, the company projected.
“We think the market is huge,” Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su said. “We’re playing to win and we think MI300 is a great product. I’m encouraged with the progress we’re making with the hardware and software.”
Those prospects helped take the focus off a sales forecast that fell short of many Wall Street estimates. Fourth-quarter revenue will be $5.8 billion to $6.4 billion, AMD said earlier Tuesday. The average analyst estimate was $6.4 billion.
Otherwise strong demand will be offset by “lower sales in the gaming segment,” Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu said in a statement. Chips for industrial, automotive and networking systems — known as the embedded market — will continue to weaken as well.
The forecast initially sent AMD shares down as much as 5.1% in late trading, but they recovered almost all of the loss after the AI remarks on the conference call. The stock was up 52% this year through the close, lifted by a broader resurgence in chipmaker shares.
AMD is playing catch-up with Nvidia in AI accelerators, the processors used to develop chatbots and other advanced tools. There’s a lot riding on AMD’s new MI300. The total market for such chips could top $150 billion by 2027, Su has said.
“We’re just at the very early innings of people adopting this,” she said on the conference call with analysts, who mostly focused their questions on the prospects for the MI300.
Read More: AMD’s New AI Chip Poised to Steal Earnings Spotlight
In the nearer term, the company has been helped by a rebound in its traditional business, the main processors for PCs. That industry has emerged from a slump that was made worse by a massive buildup in excess inventory. AMD is the second-largest maker of PC processors, after Intel Corp.
AMD’s third-quarter earnings amounted to 70 cents a share, excluding some items, compared with an estimate of 68 cents. Revenue was $5.8 billion, versus an average projection of $5.7 billion.
AMD’s PC chip division had revenue of $1.45 billion, compared with a $1.23 billion estimate, while data center sales were $1.6 billion, just short of a $1.62 billion projection. Gaming computer-related revenue was $1.51 billion, missing a $1.53 billion prediction.
AMD is the second-largest maker of chips that go onto add-in graphics cards, which turn PCs into gaming machines. It also provides chips to both Sony Group Corp. and Microsoft Corp. for their consoles. Demand for such products typically goes up during the end-of-year holiday shopping season, and components needed for that seasonal peak would have been ordered by now. Nvidia leads the market for PC add-in card chips.
The age of the Sony and Microsoft console models — both of which went on sale in late 2020 — means that demand is naturally declining, AMD’s Su said. Still, they’re selling at higher levels than the preceding generations of the gaming machines, she said.
The weakness in the embedded market has hurt other chipmakers, including Texas Instruments Inc., which has reported that demand for industrial semiconductors is cooling. AMD makes programmable chips that are used in networking gear, vehicles, space and defense hardware.
Demand from makers of communications equipment, particularly 5G-related mobile-phone gear, has declined sharply and will continue to do so, AMD projected. In the broader industrial market, orders in Europe are weak, the company said.
AMD, Nvidia and Intel, meanwhile, are trying to make their technology essential in data centers, part of a race to capture new spending on AI hardware. For now, Nvidia has taken the lead in this scramble, helping propel its market valuation past $1 trillion this year.
The chipmakers will also have to navigate new more strict rules on the export of those chips to China, the largest market for semiconductors. Washington has clamped down on such shipments in an effort, it says, to protect US national security.
(Updates with more details from conference call in 10th paragraph.)
AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su delivers a keynote address at CES 2023 at The Venetian Las Vegas on January 04, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
David Becker | Getty Images
AMD reported better-than-expected revenue and earnings for the first quarter, but the stock dropped 6% in extended trading on Tuesday after the chipmaker issued guidance for the current period that trailed analysts’ estimates.
Here’s how the company did versus Refinitiv consensus estimates for the quarter ended in December:
EPS: 60 cents per share adjusted vs. 56 cents per share expected
Revenue: $5.35 billion vs. $5.3 billion expected
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AMD said it expected about $5.3 billion in sales in the current quarter, versus Wall Street estimates of $5.48 billion. AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a statement that the company sees “growth in the second half of the year as the PC and server markets strengthen.”
The company’s net loss swung to $139 million, or 9 cents per share, from a net income of $786 million, or 56 cents per share, during the year-earlier period. AMD excludes certain losses on investments and acquisition-related costs from its earnings.
Revenue dropped 9% from $5.89 billion a year earlier.
The biggest decline came in AMD’s client group, which includes sales from PC processors. AMD reported $739 million in sales in the category, a 65% decrease from $2.1 billion in sales during the same period last year.
AMD’s report comes as the PC industry is in a deep slump, with shipments dropping 30% in the first quarter, according to IDC. Last week, Intel, AMD’s primary competitor in the PC and server chip markets, reported that its overall sales declined 36%.
“We believe the first quarter was the bottom for our client processor business,” Su said.
AMD’s data center segment sales edged up to $1.295 billion from $1.293 billion during the year-earlier period. The company said the category is likely to grow in the current quarter.
“I would say from an overall market standpoint, I think enterprise will still be mixed, with the notion that we expect some improvement. Depends a little on the macro situation,” Su said.
Sales in its embedded segment of less powerful chips for networking soared to $1.56 billion from $595 million year over year, partially due to additional revenue from the company’s purchase of Xilinx.
AMD’s gaming segment, which includes graphics processors for PCs as well as chips for consoles like Sony PlayStation 5, reported $1.76 billion in sales, down slightly from $1.88 billion last year.
Correction: The $5.3 billion revenue expectation was misstated in an earlier version.
AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su speaks at the AMD Keynote address during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on January 4, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images
AMD reported fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday, beating Wall Street expectations for sales and profit, but guided analysts to a 10% decline in year-over-year sales in the current quarter. The stock rose over 3% in extended trading. Here’s how the company did versus Refinitiv consensus estimates for the quarter ending in December:
EPS: $0.69, adjusted, versus $0.67 per share expected
Revenue: $5.6 billion, versus $5.5 billion expected
AMD said it expected $5.3 billion in sales in the current quarter, slightly lower than a Refinitiv estimate of $5.47 billion. AMD’s estimate suggests a 10% decline in sales in the current quarter. AMD’s sales rose 44% in the December quarter.
The company also said it expected its adjusted gross margin to be about 50%, a key metric for chipmakers.
AMD reported earnings as many of its rival chipmakers have stumbled in recent weeks, citing lower consumer demand for finished electronics and gluts of parts needed to make PCs and servers. Intel, AMD’s primary competitor, reported a disastrous quarter last week that included a weak 2023 outlook.
The chipmaker attributed its beat to strong growth in its embedded and data center businesses, and said that its client revenue, or chips for PCs and laptops, and its gaming segment were down.
AMD’s data center segment rose 42% year-over-year to $1.7 billion. Its embedded segment grew 1,868%, AMD said, because of sales from its purchase of Xilinx.
While AMD said it saw slow sales for its PC chips and graphics processors, it said its data center segment rose 42% year-over-year, suggesting it took market share from Intel.
But its client group, which includes sales from PC processors, was down 51% year-over-year because of a slumping PC market, AMD said. It added that its customers have too much inventory of its chips, a theme other semiconductor companies have mentioned in recent weeks. The global PC market is in a protracted slowdown, according to estimates.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said the PC environment was “weak” in a statement.
“Although the demand environment is mixed, we are confident in our ability to gain market share in 2023 and deliver long-term growth based on our differentiated product portfolio,” Su said in a statement.
AMD’s gaming business, which is comprised of graphics cards and chips for gaming consoles, was down 7% year-over-year. The decrease came from graphics cards and was offset by “semi-custom” revenue, which how the company reports sales from chips for gaming systems like the PlayStation 5.
AMD expects that the segments with PC chips and graphics processors will continue to decline in the current quarter, but data center and embedded sales will grow.
