AMD's data center sales nearly doubled to $8.5 billion. Lisa Su says AI agents are why its plain server CPUs are selling too.
AMD guided to about $17 billion next quarter, with PCs shrinking and a $1.1 billion non-cash warrant charge sitting between its two earnings-per-share numbers.
AMD’s data center business sold $8.5 billion worth of chips in the third quarter, up 97% from $4.34 billion a year earlier. That’s the headline number, and it beat the $8.19 billion analysts expected, according to Yahoo Finance. The part I found more interesting was what Lisa Su said was pulling it along.
AMD published its results on November 3 after the market closed, with CFO Jean Hu and Su’s prepared remarks released alongside the press release. Total revenue was $13.4 billion, up 45%. Data center was 64% of it, against 47% a year ago.
Agents want CPUs, not just GPUs
Chip coverage tends to focus on GPUs, but Su spent a good chunk of her remarks on the ordinary server processors instead. In her words, cloud providers added “significant EPYC capacity in the quarter for personal and enterprise agents, which are quickly becoming the next killer app for CPUs in the cloud.” Agents “work continuously and in parallel across applications and enterprise systems,” she said, “adding to accelerator demand while creating a substantial increase in CPU demand.”
She pointed to Meta’s Muse agents, which she says more than 10 million people activated in the first six weeks. That’s AMD’s description of someone else’s product, and I haven’t seen Meta publish the figure, so treat it as Su’s claim. We covered the model behind Muse in our post on Meta’s Muse Wonder frontier model.
My read: if agents really do need a lot of general-purpose compute to run tools, browse and wait on APIs, then CPU sales become a second way to bet on the AI buildout, and AMD sells those in volume. That’s an inference from her remarks, not something AMD has measured publicly. And Uber said on its own call a day later that outside agents booked four rides in its busiest week, so how fast agent traffic grows is still an open question.
The numbers that moved
| Item | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | $13.4B, up 45% | AMD press release |
| Data center revenue | $8.5B, up 97% | AMD press release |
| Data center operating income | $2.9B, margin 34% vs 25% a year ago | AMD prepared remarks |
| Q4 revenue guide | about $17B, plus or minus 3% | AMD press release |
| Q4 analyst expectation | $16.29B | FactSet, via Yahoo Finance |
For the fourth quarter AMD expects data center revenue to grow roughly 50% from the third quarter. Su also said that server revenue should double in 2027, and that total revenue should grow more than 80% next year. These are forecasts, and the company has a stake in how they sound.
On the GPU side, Su said Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle all brought their first Helios racks online. She also said OpenAI picked AMD’s “Turin” EPYC chips as host processors for its first custom accelerator platforms.
Two numbers for earnings per share
AMD reported $2.09 per share on a non-GAAP basis and $1.46 on a GAAP basis. Hu tied the difference to a $1.1 billion non-cash charge for warrants AMD issued under its customer agreements, which it began recognizing as it shipped MI450 GPUs. Hu said the charge moves with AMD’s share price and the odds that customers meet the warrant conditions, and that it will grow as those agreements progress.
My read: the warrants are the price AMD pays for those big GPU commitments, and a rising stock makes the bill bigger on paper. It doesn’t hit cash or free cash flow, which Hu said, but it will keep the GAAP figure lumpy.
Who isn’t invited
PCs are the weak spot. Client and gaming revenue fell 8% to $3.7 billion, with gaming down 40%. Su said PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter because higher memory and component costs hurt demand, and AMD is planning for PC unit shipments to fall by a double-digit percentage in 2027. For the fourth quarter it guides that segment down more than 20%.
AMD’s own cash picture got tighter too. Inventory rose about $3 billion from the prior quarter to $11.5 billion, and free cash flow was $554 million, because AMD is buying supply for next year. My read: that is a bet it can sell what it is stockpiling.
What to watch
Yahoo Finance reported AMD shares up more than 4% after hours. Su said Helios and the new “Venice” server chips both ramp this quarter, so AMD’s January report is the first real test of the $17 billion guide. I’d also look at whether it breaks out agent demand any further than a few lines in a prepared statement.
Note on sources
Figures for revenue, segments, warrants, inventory and the outlook come from AMD’s press release and prepared remarks. The $8.19 billion data center estimate and the $16.29 billion FactSet figure come from Yahoo Finance’s reports. I couldn’t verify Su’s Muse activation number independently.