MANY MINDEDAMD's data centre business doubled while its consumer business fell by a third
AMD reported record quarterly revenue of $11.5 billion, up 50% year on year. Data centre revenue reached $6.7 billion, up 107%, and now accounts for 58% of the company. Gaming revenue fell 31% to $779 million. Chief executive Lisa Su attributed the consumer weakness to prices weighing on demand while saying she remains optimistic about the client market. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $1.66.
The split inside one set of results is the story. A second credible supplier of AI accelerators is the main structural check on what compute costs — a market with one seller prices differently from a market with two, and AMD doubling its accelerator business is the clearest evidence this quarter that the second seller is real. That pushes in the direction of cheaper intelligence, which is the input to most of what this site tracks.
The other half pushes the other way. Consumer hardware is getting more expensive, and the memory shortage running through this week's other cards is the reason. The same buildout that is making data centre compute abundant is bidding away the memory that goes into the machines people own. Elsewhere today, a Japanese distributor signalled graphics card prices up 20 to 40%, and Microsoft quietly deleted its own 32GB memory recommendation.
So: compute in the data centre is getting cheaper and more plentiful; compute you can hold is getting more expensive. Both facts are in the same earnings report. Which one matters more depends on whether you rent your intelligence or own it.
Source: Tom's Hardware