Interface News Reporter | Li Biao
After the US stock market closed on Tuesday, American chip manufacturer AMD released its second quarter performance report that exceeded external expectations.
The financial report shows that the sales of AMD's artificial intelligence chips continue to be booming, and the revenue of its directly related data center division has increased by about double compared to the same period last year. Since the beginning of this year, the department's revenue has grown rapidly to a historic high, with a surge of over 80% in the previous quarter.
In the second quarter, AMD's total revenue was $5.84 billion, a year-on-year increase of 9%, compared to the previous market expectation of $5.72 billion; The net profit was 265 million US dollars, compared to 27 million US dollars in the same period last year, an increase of nearly 8 times year-on-year.
At present, the Data Center Division is AMD's largest revenue division, with Q2 revenue of $2.8 billion, accounting for approximately half of the company's revenue. Since the release of AMD's Instinct MI300X data center AI GPU, which competes with Nvidia H100, the sales of the product have been closely monitored by the public. According to AMD's official introduction, the data center division's revenue surged in the second quarter, mainly driven by the sales performance of MI300X.
According to AMD CEO Lisa Su, the company's sales of artificial intelligence chips were "higher than expected," with revenue from the MI300 series chips exceeding $1 billion this quarter.
Based on this performance, Su Zifeng has also raised the company's AI chip revenue forecast for this year, from the previous $4 billion to $4.5 billion, accounting for approximately 15% of overall sales. Due to the high demand for MI300X since its launch, she expects the tight supply of chips to continue until 2025.
As one of Nvidia's few competitors, AMD has always been seen by tech giants as an "additional option" to get rid of excessive dependence on the former. Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Oracle and other major customers of NVIDIA are all buying AMD's MI300 to stockpile AI computing power.
Su Zifeng mentioned that Microsoft's usage of MI300 chips is increasing, serving as the computing power support for GPT-4 Turbo and supporting multiple Copilot services such as Microsoft Word and Teams. According to market research firm Omdia, Microsoft is also one of the largest customers who purchase Nvidia products, buying 150000 H100 GPUs last year.
Currently, AMD is making every effort to catch up with Nvidia's pace. In June of this year, the company announced the next-generation AI GPU Instinct MI325X. This product is benchmarked against the upgraded version of Nvidia H100's H200 GPU. The official claim is that MI325X is 30% faster in computing speed and has twice the memory bandwidth of H200. The H200 will begin mass delivery and launch in the third quarter of this year, while the MI325X is planned to be launched in the fourth quarter.
In addition to AI and other businesses, the company's client business unit related to consumer electronics products such as personal computers has also seen significant growth in performance.
Last year, consumer electronics experienced a comprehensive downturn, with AMD's client business, gaming, and embedded business units being the most severely affected by the market downturn. Currently, with the gradual recovery of the PC market, the client business unit's Q2 revenue was $1.49 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%. According to its introduction, the company's Ryzen series CPUs, mainly used in desktop and laptop computers, have seen significant growth in sales recently.
The gaming and embedded businesses continue to decline. The revenue of the gaming division was 640 million US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 59% and a month on month decrease of 30%; The revenue of the Embedded Business Unit was 861 million US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 41%. The company stated that the demand in this part of the market is still sluggish and is still bearing the impact of the downward cycle of customer inventory adjustments.
In terms of performance outlook, AMD expects its revenue for the third quarter of 2024 to be approximately $6.7 billion, with a fluctuation of $300 million, which is basically consistent with market expectations.
After the release of the financial report, the capital market gave positive feedback, and AMD's stock price rose by over 7.7% after hours.