AI

AMD revenue jumps as it keeps pushing against the AI narrative

Is AMD doing a little better in the AI market race than most people think?

The company has been written off as a distant runner-up to Nvidia, particularly where data center AI is concerned, but AMD’s first quarter 2025 earnings report and its second quarter outlook didn’t look much like those of a contender on the wane. Still, tariff uncertainty is lingering over AMD’s future just as it is with all other semiconductor companies.

Overall Q1 revenue for AMD came in at $7.4 billion, 36% higher than the $5.5 billion in revenue reported for the same period last year. Data Center AI led the way, accounting for $3.67 billion, a 57% year-over-year jump from roughly $2.3 billion in Q1 2024. That revenue growth helped drive operating income for that business segment from $541 million in Q1 a year ago to $932 million in the most recent quarter.

AMD touted AI infrastructure progress like its partnership with Oracle to have its Instinct MI 355X GPUs deployed in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure following on the earlier deployment of its MI 300X there.

“We also added multiple Tier 1 cloud and enterprise customers in the quarter, including one of the largest frontier model developers that is now using Instinct GPUs to serve a significant portion of their daily inference traffic,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su on the Q1 earnings call. “Training engagements also ramps in the quarter as multiple Tier 1 hyperscale AI and enterprise customers scaled Instinct GPU clusters to train internal and next-gen frontier models in parallel.”

She added that AMD is “making meaningful progress with sovereign AI deployments as countries expand investments to establish domestic nation-scale AI infrastructure.”

Su also said the company remains on track for production of its MI 350X GPUs later this year, and for next year’s planned launch of the MI400X series.

Meanwhile, revenue in AMD’s Client and Gaming segment also showed strong year-over-year growth, with $2.9 billion in revenue representing a 28% increase from Q1 2024. AMD didn’t fare as well in its Embedded segment, where revenue was down about 3% year-over-year to $823 million. 

For the second quarter of 2025, AMD is projecting overall sales to amount to about $7.4 billion in revenue, plus or minus $300 million. That comes after the company already said last month it could take an $800 million hit to its revenue coming from China.

Su said near the end of prepared remarks on the earnings call, “In summary, our first quarter results and second quarter outlook reflect the momentum we are building across our business. While we face some headwinds from the dynamic macroeconomic and regulatory environments, including the recently announced export controls for Instinct shipments to China, we believe they are more than offset by the powerful tailwinds from our leadership product portfolio.”