AMD’s Q2 2026 financial results show record revenue across the business, but gaming is contributing less and less to that overall pie. Overall, AMD’s Q2 revenue was $11.5 billion, up 50% year-over-year and up 13% quarter-over-quarter. In AMD’s gaming segment, however, it saw $779 million in revenue, down 31% YoY due to “lower semi-custom revenue,” according to AMD’s press release.
That’s not a new story, as AMD has continually pointed to the late stage of the console lifecycle as the driving force behind declining gaming revenue. CEO Lisa Su, however, also says revenue is declining due to rising component costs. “Gaming graphics revenue also declined year-over-year as higher industry-wide component costs contributed to higher graphics card prices and weighed on overall demand,” Su said.
Earlier this year, AMD said that it expected a 20% decline in gaming revenue in the second half of the year, which is reaffirmed in its Q2 2026 earnings call. “[We expect] a modest decline in our client gaming segment, with slight growth in client offset by strong double-digit decline in gaming,” said AMD's Jean Hu, executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer.
Despite these declines, Su says she's 'optimistic' about the future of AMD's client CPU business, particularly when it comes to AI PCs. "I think AI PCs will become more important as it relates to our client business in 2026. I think our first half performance has been very strong, and although we are expecting that the market will decline in the second half, the market's actually held up, you know, better than you know most people would have thought," said Su.
Despite a large decline in gaming revenue, AMD’s overall client business (including gaming) brought in $3.8 billion, up 6% year-over-year. Su says this is due to strong demand for Ryzen CPUs, but also increased market share for Ryzen PRO chips. “Commercial adoption continued to expand in the quarter, with Ryzen PRO sales growing more than 50% year over year as we closed new wins with large healthcare, technology, automotive, and financial services companies,” Su said.
Declining gaming revenue has been massively offset by increasing data center revenue, unsurprisingly. AMD’s data center revenue is up 107% year-over-year, representing $6.7 billion of revenue. AMD expects that the data center will continue growing the business in the next quarter, as well.
“We expect [Q3] revenue to be approximately $13 billion plus or minus $300 million, at the middle point of our guidance, revenue is expected to be up 41% year over year, driven by very strong double-digit growth in our data center segment,” said Hu.
Surprisingly, AMD also says it expected “strong” double-digit growth in its embedded business, which has traditionally represented the smallest slice of AMD’s revenue pie. In Q2, embedded revenue was $977 million, which is up 19% year-over-year, which AMD attributes to increased demand (perhaps in the realm of physical AI). That means gaming is the smallest part of AMD's revenue pie for the moment, and that position seems likely to continue until we see some kind of new discrete GPU or console hardware from the division that might spur upgrades.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
