AMD’s CEO believes that the chipmaker has closed the performance gap between Nvidia and its market-leading artificial Intelligence processors. The company unveiled new products aimed at a market valued at hundreds of billions.
The Silicon Valley-based company announced on Thursday that its MI325X chips will be available to customers by the end of the year. It said the chip offered “industry leading” performance when compared with Nvidia’s current generation H200 AI processors.
AMD’s MI350 next-generation chip, which is aimed at competing with Nvidia’s Blackwell system will be available in the second half 2025.
Lisa Su, the US chipmaker’s chief executive, has emerged as the main challenger to Nvidia, which controls the infrastructure that powers generative AI.
Su stated that her goal was to have the company become “the end-to-end AI leaders” within the next 10 Years. “You need to be very ambitious”. This is just the beginning of the AI race, not its end.
Microsoft announced this week that it was the first cloud service provider to offer its customers the latest GB200 chip.
AMD is Nvidia’s main competitor when it comes to offering off-the shelf AI chips. The so-called “hyperscalers” — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — also build their own AI chips.
However, it is still a distant second. AMD’s projected AI chip sales of $4.5bn for 2024 are small in comparison to Nvidia’s $26.3bn AI data centre chips sales in just the quarter ending in July.
Su is confident in the fact that demand will continue to grow. The company predicted that the total market addressable for AI chips will reach $400bn in 2027.
Su explained that “when we started, this was seen as a very large number.” “I think that people are moving toward our big number due to the huge demand for AI infrastructure.”
Chips are only one component of the infrastructure required to build cutting edge AI systems. AMD announced on Thursday new networking technology as well as upgrades to its ROCm toolkit. All of this is aimed at providing AI infrastructure quickly and scale.
Su said that “one of the things we are really putting in place is the end to end infrastructure for the data center.” “People want to have a large cluster of chips [in a server] in order to train the biggest language models.”
Su has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and worked for Texas Instruments, IBM, Freescale Semiconductor, before joining AMD as senior vice president in 2012.
When she became chief executive of AMD in 2014, the company’s shares were at $4. Some analysts predicted that it would go bankrupt within a few short years due to its inability to compete with Intel.
AMD is now a leader in the server chip business and has surpassed Intel’s AI capabilities as it diversifies its PC business. AMD’s shares closed Wednesday at $171, just before the announcement. This gives it a market cap of $275bn, almost triple Intel.
Su believes that AI will be the main driver for AMD’s growth in the future, and he wants to attract the same customers as Nvidia.
Su stated that people are open to exploring different architectures. Microsoft and Meta are both using AMD’s MI300 AI graphics processor units (GPUs) in their current versions.
Su stated that Amazon, who is already an AMD customer, will likely follow. “It is a point in time conversation.”
AMD’s strategy is similar to what Nvidia does with Blackwell. It aims not only to sell individual chips but also whole racks of servers made up of several chips and Nvidia networking equipment.
AMD is pursuing a strategy of aggressive acquisitions and investments to catch up. This includes the announcement of the $4.9bn purchase of ZT Systems which manufactures servers for the small AI hyperscale group.
Su stated that, in terms of possible regulatory reviews, “our current expectations are US-EU [checks] and there are also a few jurisdictions, but at this time, we do not pass thresholds for China”.
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