AMD warns the Intel and Nvidia partnership is a risk to its business — quarterly report outlines risk from 'increased competition and pricing pressure'

(Image credit: AMD)

The Nvidia/Intel partnership announced in mid-September is putting pressure on AMD, as stated in its November 2025 quarterly report. According to the document, Nvidia’s $5-billion stake in Intel is an economic and strategic risk, especially in a market that is “highly competitive and rapidly evolving.” If the two can create an RTX SoC that integrates the expertise of both companies, AMD could lose its advantage in APUs, especially those designed for handheld consoles. Aside from that, it also cited its competitors' business practices, saying how they take advantage of their market positions to put AMD on the back foot.

“Intel Corporation (Intel) uses its microprocessor market position to price its products aggressively and target our customers and channel partners with special incentives. These aggressive activities have reduced and may reduce our unit sales and average selling prices for many of our products, adversely affecting our business,” AMD said in its report. “Similarly, NVIDIA Corporation (NVIDIA) leverages its market position in data center GPU, financial resources, and proprietary software ecosystem to promote its systems and influences [sic] customers who do business with us.”

Even though AMD is an established, relatively stable company, we must also consider that it faces industry giants. For example, despite Intel’s recent financial woes and its Intel Core desktop chips losing ground versus Ryzen CPUs, it still has a massive market share lead over AMD. Aside from that, Nvidia, currently the most valuable company on Earth based on its $5 trillion market cap, has a massive war chest, allowing it to throw as much cash as it wants to gain a market advantage. While designing a CPU with a powerful integrated GPU will certainly take a lot of time and effort, the partnership of these two companies can potentially result in a new product line that will negate AMD’s technical advantage.

“NVIDIA announced a partnership and investment in Intel to partner on new data center and client platform products,” writes AMD. “This partnership may result in increased competition and pricing pressure for our products, which could materially adversely impact our business, financial condition, and margins.” While it’s unlikely to just throw in the towel and surrender in the face of stiffer competition, it’s also managing the expectations of its investors, telling them what it’s realistically facing.

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

3 Comments Comment from the forums

Thunder64

I mean, they're not wrong.

Market leaders certainly shouldn’t abuse their position to gain an unfair advantage over competitors.

It's been proven that Intel did this repeatedly in the past. Rebates to ODM's to not use AMD, rigging benchmarks to make AMD look worse, and contra-revenue to push tablets come to mind.

The gov't never bothered to bail out AMD when they had to spinoff their fabs. Things changed during the GFC of 2008 and the government decided to bailout banks and auto manufactures but passed on AMD, though that may have been a blessing in disguise.

Now that Intel is the only leading edge fab in the US and is in poor shape the government decided to invest in Intel. While the US having a leading edge fab is vitally important that also basically signaled that Intel is now on the "Too big to fail" list. Nvidia noticed that and invested in Intel. What they plan to do, I don't know.

Nvidia loves margins and Intel wants big wins in AI so maybe the plan is to pair Intel CPU's with Nvidia tech. I doubt Nvidia is interested in consoles and may not want to push for an Intel/Nvidia SoC that would compete against their own dGPU's.

Therefore I really don't see this being a big deal in the consumer market and helping drive down prices for us mere mortals. If anything, I am more worried about what Intel will do with its Arc dGPU's now. Losing them would be a blow to competition, and Intel's silence on this front has been deafening.
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Notton

Sounds like a botched interview question
Interviewer: "What are your weaknesses?"
AMD: "I don't have enough capital to drastically improve production"
Interviewer: "... and you overcame that by...?"
AMD: "No, that's it."
Interviewer: "... Okay."
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bit_user

The article said:
The Nvidia/Intel partnership announced in mid-September is putting pressure on AMD, as stated in its November 2025 quarterly report.
Yes, because they have to list every risk, no matter how small or improbable. Otherwise, their investors could sue them, claiming they failed to disclose known risks to the business. So, they'll say this, even if they aren't actually too worried about it!

The article said:
Market leaders certainly shouldn’t abuse their position to gain an unfair advantage over competitors. But even though AMD feels it will face a significant challenge with the Nvidia/Intel partnership, we welcome it,
You welcome it? And I don't care if you only meant that you welcome competition. There already was plenty of competition. As your other quotes make clear, Intel and Nvidia already have abused their market dominance. Don't just turn and wash all that away in the very next sentence!

I suspect you're just trying to make it sound like you're not siding too much with AMD. IMO, any time you play the game of trying to make it sound like you're not siding too much with one party, you lose. Just stick to the facts and the most detached interpretation you can manage. Any time you get accused of bias, challenge your accuser on the facts.

The article said:
as it will push AMD to continue innovating and offer better pricing to survive. In the end, we will have a more dynamic market and better choices for the average consumer.
They have more than enough competition, for that. Pretty much the only market they currently dominate is the server CPU market, and yet Intel moves more unit volume and is still able to bring pricing pressure on them, there.

iGPUs, sure. Intel has been pretty competitive with AMD's iGPUs, leaving aside Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo). But, if they want to partner up with Nvidia on that, fine.

As for the datacenter AI products, competition stops being a good thing if it's unfair, abusing market dominance, and acting to keep other challengers from providing viable alternatives. How about you wait until AMD achieves some real market penetration, with its MI products, before deciding they need to be kept in check. What Nvidia is doing with Intel's datacenter products attempts to shut them out of the AI market. That is not good for customers or the market.
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