The robust demand for high-performance GPUs by AI servers has opened up more room for imagination for AMD.
On July 30th, US time, AMD released its financial report for the second quarter of 2024, with a net profit that surged by 881% year-on-year, and the data center business revenue doubled, becoming the focus of market attention.
According to the financial data, AMD's total revenue for this quarter reached $5.835 billion, not only exceeding the previously expected $5.72 billion but also achieving a year-on-year increase of 9% and a sequential increase of 7%.
The net profit even reached $265 million, with a year-on-year growth rate as high as 881%, and a sequential growth of 115%.
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The following are the detailed business data:
Data Center Division: Revenue reached a record high of $2.8 billion, with a year-on-year increase of 115%, and a sequential increase of 21%.Client Business Unit: Revenue was $1.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%, and a sequential increase of 9%.
Gaming Business Unit: Revenue was $648 million, a year-on-year decrease of 59%, and a sequential decrease of 30%.
Embedded Business Unit: Revenue was $861 million, a year-on-year decrease of 41%, and a sequential increase of 2%.
The significant growth in data center business is one of the highlights of AMD's financial report this quarter, with the MI300 chip's sales exceeding $1 billion in a single quarter, driving a substantial increase in data center department revenue.
According to AMD, the increase in data center business unit revenue is mainly driven by a significant increase in shipments of Instinct GPUs and strong growth in sales of the fourth-generation AMD EPYC CPUs. The increase in the client business unit revenue is mainly due to the increased sales of Ryzen processors. In addition, the decline in gaming business unit revenue is affected by the decrease in semi-custom business revenue, while the embedded business unit revenue is affected by customers adjusting their inventory.
The MI300 series is an AI chip released by AMD at the end of last year, including the GPU MI300X, as well as the MI300A, which integrates CPU (Central Processing Unit) cores and GPU accelerators. Among them, the MI300X is positioned against Nvidia's H100. Previously, AMD had introduced that the performance of MI300X during AI training is on par with Nvidia's H100; in terms of inference, its performance exceeds that of competing products. Taking a single server composed of 8 GPUs as an example, when running the 176 billion-parameter BLOOM model and the 70 billion-parameter Llama2 model, the MI300X platform's performance is 1.4 to 1.6 times that of the H100 platform.
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su stated in the analyst conference call that the company's AI chip sales were "better than expected" and revealed the iteration roadmap for future products. Dr. Su introduced in the call that Microsoft's usage of MI300 chips has increased to support the computing power of GPT-4 Turbo and support multiple Copilot services such as Microsoft Word and Teams. Hugging Face is one of the first customers to adopt the new Microsoft cloud Azure instance, enabling enterprises and AI customers to deploy hundreds of thousands of models on the MI300 GPU with a single click.
In June of this year, AMD has already announced the iteration roadmap, planning to launch the MI325X in the fourth quarter of this year, and to launch the MI350 series and MI400 series in the next two years. Among them, M1300X and MI325X will adopt the CDNA3 architecture, M1350 will adopt the CDNA4 structure, and MI400 will adopt the next-generation CDNA architecture. AMD will continue to launch new product series every year. In the industry's view, this pace is in line with Nvidia's release plan.
"The MI325 will be launched later this year, and the MI350 series will be launched next year, just like Nvidia's Blackwell architecture, we are also on the road to CDNA. I still believe the market needs more computing power." Dr. Su stated in the conference call.In addition, Dr. Lisa Su stated that from a market perspective, the demand for inference will be greater than for training. AI PCs are an important part of the PC category, and the PC market represents a good opportunity for revenue growth for AMD's business.
This year, AMD has been accelerating its AI layout through investment. In July, AMD acquired Silo AI, Europe's largest private artificial intelligence laboratory, for $665 million. The company provides end-to-end AI-driven solutions, and this acquisition is considered an important step for AMD to catch up with NVIDIA. During the year, AMD also participated in a $1 billion financing round for the AI data platform Scale AI.
Dr. Su said in a call that in addition to acquiring Silo AI, AMD has invested over $125 million in more than a dozen artificial intelligence companies over the past 12 months to expand the AMD ecosystem and maintain the leading position of AMD's computing platform. She said that AMD will continue to invest in software, which is one of the reasons for investing in Silo AI.
Dr. Su expressed that AMD's main view on investing in the AI field is that it is necessary to invest in this industry. The potential of AI is so great that it affects the way companies operate, etc. I believe there will be multiple solutions on the market, and AMD has demonstrated a very strong roadmap. For large language models, GPUs are still the preferred chips.
AMD expects revenue of about $6.7 billion in the third quarter, with a fluctuation of $300 million, which means it will grow by about 16% year-on-year and 15% quarter-on-quarter. The data center GPU revenue in 2024 is expected to exceed $4.5 billion, higher than the forecast in April.
Looking forward, AMD is optimistic about the growth of the data center GPU business and expects to continue to expand market share.
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