CEO Lisa Su says AMD is now a data center-first company — DC is now 4X larger than its gaming sales

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Data center sales contributed over 50% of AMD's revenue last quarter.

AMD
(Image credit: AMD)

Back in the day, the bulk of AMD's business was client CPUs for midrange PCs, but today, most of AMD's money comes from its sales of EPYC processors for data centers. To that end, AMD had every right to call itself a data center company for quite some time. Yet, this week, Lisa Su, chief executive of the chip designer, formally said (via SeekingAlpha) that AMD is now a 'data center first' company.

"In our last quarter, I think data center was over 50% of our revenue," said Lisa Su at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia And Technology Conference. "So, we really are a data center-first company."

Indeed, last quarter, AMD's data center revenue reached $2.834 billion, significantly higher than the performance of the company's client and gaming business, which posted $1.492 billion and $648 million in sales, respectively. AMD's data center business accounted for 48% of the company's revenue, though its EPYC CPU is its main product and source of revenue and income.

"It has been really exciting to see kind of how the datacenter market has grown for us as a business," Su added. "When you think about where we started, the data center business, as you said, we had a low single-digit share. It was a similar percentage of our revenue. In our last quarter, I think data center was over 50% of our revenue. So, we really are a datacenter first company."

When a company says that one of its businesses is clearly ahead of the other and essentially demonstrates that the entire company's focus is on this business, it is time to ask whether other business units have been put on the back burner. Given AMD's slow progress in graphics, we can draw certain conclusions.

However, underlying architectures and business decisions define the success of companies like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. On the CPU side, AMD uses a unified Zen microarchitecture. On the GPU side, it is blending RDNA (graphics) and CDNA (compute) into UDNA, which may mean that graphics will no longer be a second-class citizen at AMD. What business decisions AMD will make with its products going forward is something only time will tell, though.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

22 Comments Comment from the forums
  • pug_s
    That explains why Ryzen 9000 has poor gaming performance. The chiplets are optimized for DC related and not for desktops.
    Reply
  • usertests
    pug_s said:
    That explains why Ryzen 9000 has poor gaming performance. The chiplets are optimized for DC related and not for desktops.
    Tom's Hardware and Phoronix seemingly got good results. I think it's unoptimized on Windows. But even in the best case scenarios, the IPC boost is modest, AVX-512 isn't relevant to most gaming (maybe emulators), and clock speeds have hit a brick wall.

    There were some other oddities like the cross-CCD latency being abnormally high compared to Zen 4.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    AMD did a pretty serious rework with Zen 5 so it's not surprising that the gains aren't universal. In the past when they've made these types of changes they've also been coupled with clockspeed increases which isn't the case here. The biggest noticeable change I'd say is actually in full load efficiency.

    With so much of their revenue coming from datacenter the biggest thing consumers will notice is likely availability related. I'd imagine to some degree this has also driven their pivot on consumer graphics as you can get a lot more low-mid range die per wafer.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    How shocking... Not.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • waltc3
    Slow progress in graphics...? I guess you mean that AMD isn't selling $2k GPUs?...;) My 6900XT is a keeper. It runs great. It's a beautiful card @ 4k. nVidia is also making more in its Data-Center/AI sales than its gaming sales. Does that mean nVidia also has slow progress in graphics?...;)
    Reply
  • DS426
    Remember that AMD was a purebred CPU company up until the ATI acquisition in 2006. It didn't take long after for them to be writing the masterclass on integrated graphics. That's why everyone is going to be mindblown if MI300A really doesn't shine as it should in theory be their most glowing product.

    "Slow progress in graphics" but GPU sales have significantly accelerated with AMD expecting to make over $1B/yr just in DC GPU revenue. That's probably ten-fold up from what they were doing just five or six years ago.
    Reply
  • maestro0428
    Dont lose sight of who gotcha where you are today Lisa. When the Ai bubble plateaus, youll want those diy and gamers back.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    duh?
    Literally anyone knows Server is always more profitable than gaming.

    Same reason Nvidia focuses on server over gaming anymore.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    maestro0428 said:
    Dont lose sight of who gotcha where you are today Lisa. When the Ai bubble plateaus, youll want those diy and gamers back.
    I was thinking along those lines, but then I realized that's false.

    Otherwise they wouldn't be the laughing stock marketshare wise on the consumer side on both fronts where they've been struggling, even now, to get marketshare from Intel.

    So, no, AMD (or Lisa) owes the consumer market diddly squat.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • Kondamin
    waltc3 said:
    Does that mean nVidia also has slow progress in graphics?...;)
    Well yes, if they cared about gaming graphics they wouldn’t be shoving stuff like dlss and other inference garbage down our throats and instead give us more hardware that rendered the actual graphics
    Reply