AMD (AMD) President and CEO Doctor Lisa Su says his company is just beginning to commercialize high-powered AI chips.
“We’ve accelerated our AI roadmap and are on a one-year cadence for new product launches,” Su told Yahoo Finance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology conference on Monday. “This is an AI supercycle.”
Later this year, AMD will introduce its MI325 AI chip, followed by the MI350 next year and the MI400 in 2026, taking aim at rival Nvidia (NVDA) domination.
Su added: “We think we can have a very important part of the training and inference of these large language models.”
The new MI chips unveiled by Su follow the successful launch of the MI300x about a year ago. It can use up to 192GB of memory and features a whopping 153 billion transistors.
The massive memory capabilities of AMD’s AI chip could be used to train large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, commonly referred to as “LLM.” This is a segment dominated by Nvidia, but AMD is looking to carve out a place in a growing market.
Su said AMD could generate $4.5 billion in sales from the chip alone in 2024, up from about $100 million in revenue from AI chips last year. The company’s previous forecast for the MI300 was for about $4 billion in sales this year.
“It’s the fastest growing product in AMD history,” Su said.
“The increase in MI300 guidance (in Q2) is positive compared to the lower expectations (including our own). AMD noted that supply and technical concerns are overblown and said they have not seen any reductions this year from their major customers (we believe Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META) and Oracle (ORCL) are in the top 3). We assume the market will remain around $5 billion this year, which still supports the potential for $8-9 billion next year,” Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis said in a client note.
The momentum behind AI chips continues to fuel AMD’s financial results and profits.
Second-quarter sales and profits increased 9% and 19%, respectively, from a year earlier.
At the midpoint of its third-quarter revenue guidance, AMD expects annual growth of about 16% and sequential growth of about 15%.
“AI is a much bigger cycle than I expected five years ago,” Su said. “We’re making big bets now for the next five years.”
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