AMD's Revenue Declines as PC CPU Sales Plummet And The Data Center Market stalls
May 04, 2023 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
AMD's revenues decreased year-over-year as sales of client CPUs dropped dramatically. Sales for its data center division stalled due to the general business slowdown. Overall, annual revenue was down 9.2 percent to $5.4 billion. Client CPUs, or consumer PCs, saw their revenue decline by 65 percent to $739 million. In an earnings call, CEO Lisa Su stated that OEMs and affiliates were focused on reducing their semiconductor inventories, but she anticipates that sales will increase in the second quarter and the seasonally better second half of the year.
Su reported that sales for AMD's data center division remained unchanged at $1.3 billion, with higher cloud sales offsetting lower enterprise sales. OEMs' "high inventory levels again hampered the company's enterprise sales" and "near-term macroeconomic uncertainty." Su believes that the division's sales will increase later this year due to a number of significant customer wins and the introduction of new products. MI300 will support the El Capitan exascale supercomputing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as well as large cloud AI customers, according to her.
MI300 deployments are anticipated to accelerate in the fourth quarter as a result of "supercomputing wins" and "early cloud AI wins." She added that the company is on track to release Bergamot, its first cloud-native server CPU, and Genoa-X, its fourth-generation Epyc processor with chiplets for leadership and technical computing applications, by the end of this quarter. Specifically, Su identified AI workloads as a significant growth opportunity. "We are in the very early stages of the AI computing era, and the adoption and growth rate is faster than any other technology in recent history. "And as the recent interest in generative AI highlights, bringing the benefits of large-language models and other AI capabilities to cloud, Edge and endpoints requires significant increases in computer performance. AMD is very well-positioned to capitalize on this increased demand for compute."