AMD Forecasts a $17 Billion Quarter After Data Center Sales Nearly Double

AMD expects to bring in about $17 billion in the fourth quarter, plus or minus 3%, a jump of roughly 27% from the record quarter it reported after the market closed Tuesday. The company said the midpoint would mean growth of about 66% from a year earlier.

Third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $13.4 billion, AMD said in its earnings release, above the top of the $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million, range it gave in August. Non-GAAP earnings per share climbed 74% to $2.09. Analysts had expected $1.97 a share on revenue of $13.08 billion, Yahoo Finance reported, citing Bloomberg consensus estimates. On a GAAP basis, AMD earned $2.4 billion, or $1.46 a share.

Data Center does most of the work

Data Center segment revenue reached a record $8.5 billion, up 97%, on demand for EPYC server processors and the launch of the Instinct MI450 Series GPUs. Analysts had pegged the segment at $8.19 billion, per Yahoo Finance, and it accounted for more than 60% of the quarter’s sales.

“Demand for our Instinct and EPYC products continued to strengthen, and we expect growth to accelerate further in the fourth quarter as we scale Helios and ‘Venice’ production,” Lisa Su, AMD’s chair and CEO, said in the release.

AMD said Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are running models and workloads on its first Helios rack-scale systems, which pair MI450 GPUs with 6th Gen EPYC CPUs. Last month the company also introduced Helion, an open rack blueprint that lets customers set the mix of CPUs and GPUs for agentic workloads.

Profitability rose faster than sales. Non-GAAP operating income grew 75% to $3.9 billion, and the non-GAAP operating margin widened to 29% from 24% a year earlier. “Our fourth-quarter outlook reflects accelerating revenue and earnings growth, driven by strong demand across our Data Center portfolio,” said Jean Hu, AMD’s chief financial officer. The company guided to a non-GAAP gross margin of about 55% for the fourth quarter, slightly below the 56% it posted in the third.

A different read from Intel’s

The forecast comes days after Intel guided fourth-quarter revenue to $15 billion to $16 billion, well below analyst projections, as it pointed to a slowing PC market that it expects to stay soft at least through the first half of next year. Intel’s stock fell nearly 29% on that outlook, Yahoo Finance noted.

AMD’s own PC business held up in the third quarter. Client revenue rose 7% to $2.9 billion on Ryzen mobile processor sales. Gaming was the weak spot: revenue there fell 40% to $773 million on lower semi-custom and graphics sales, and the combined Client and Gaming segment fell 8% to $3.7 billion.