Recently, during an investor call, AMD revealed that their Instinct MI300X GPU surpassed $1 billion in sales during the second quarter of this year. This GPU is considered a strong contender against Nvidia's AI acceleration hardware. AMD CEO Lisa Su forecasts that these accelerators will bring in over $4.5 billion in revenue for the company in the 2024 fiscal year, exceeding the previous target of $400 million.
Since its launch in December last year, AMD's MI300 series accelerators have become its most powerful products, theoretically surpassing Nvidia's H100 in terms of floating-point performance, memory bandwidth, and capacity, making them suitable for large AI model inference. Su mentioned that Microsoft has expanded the use of the MI300x accelerator to support GPT-4Turbo and multiple Copilot services, including Microsoft365, Chat, Word, and Teams.
In the second quarter, AMD's Instinct GPU sales accounted for a third of its $2.8 billion data center revenue. Additionally, sales of AMD's Epyc processors saw a "double-digit" growth, resulting in a 115% year-over-year increase in data center revenue, nearly half of the company's total revenue of $5.8 billion for the second quarter. Overall net income reached $265 million, a significant year-over-year increase of 881%. AMD's client business also grew, with a 49% year-over-year increase in the second quarter and a 9% increase from the first quarter, primarily due to strong sales of Ryzen desktop and mobile processors.
Despite AMD's strong performance in the data center and personal computer sectors, the overall performance was still impacted by the weak demand for embedded and semi-custom gaming components. In the second quarter, AMD's gaming revenue decreased by 59% year-over-year and 30% quarter-over-quarter. Su explained that this decline was mainly due to the slowing demand for game consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Although sales of the Radeon 6000 and 7000 series cards increased, they could not offset the reduction in semi-custom orders.
Looking ahead, Su expects gaming revenue to continue to decline in the third quarter, but AMD's data center and client products will continue to grow, mainly driven by strong demand for the MI300X GPU and newly released Ryzen AI and Ryzen9000 processors. She also noted that buyers may face challenges in obtaining AI accelerators like the MI300X due to ongoing supply chain constraints, which are expected to persist until 2025.
Key Points:
🌟 AMD's Instinct MI300X GPU exceeded $1 billion in sales in Q2, becoming a significant source of data center revenue.
📈 Data center revenue increased by 115% year-over-year, nearly half of the total revenue.
🎮 Gaming division revenue declined by 59%, primarily due to weak console demand.