AMD’s AI GPU business has barely been going for a year but it’s already as big as its entire CPU operation

AMD only announced its Instinct MI300, arguably the company’s first truly competitive GPU for AI inferencing and training, back in November last year. It’s really only been selling in big numbers for the last few months. But already its bringing in about as much money as AMD’s entire CPU operations.

That includes CPUs for servers, CPUs for cloud computing, for desktop PCs, for laptops, the works. So says AMD’s CEO Lisa Su, speaking at the company’s most recent earnings call for financial wonks, held yesterday (via Seeking Alpha).

Su was responding to a high-ranking bean counter from Swiss bank UBS, who was trying to drill down into exactly how much money AMD has been raking in over recent months specifically from its nascent AI GPU operations.

The analyst reckoned AMD probably notched up in the region of $1.5 billion in revenues for September alone and speculated that following months must be even more. To which Su had this to say:

“We actually did better in the Data Center GPU business relative to our initial expectations. So, you would imagine that the business was actually greater than $1.5 billion [in September of this year]. I mean, we’re actually seeing now our [AI] GPU business really approaching the scale of our CPU business.”

That’s some achievement and no doubt helps explain why AMD’s share price is about 2.5x what it was in mid 2022. Of course, everything is relative. While AMD’s burgeoning AI GPU sales look stellar in isolation, they pale compared to Nvidia’s.

In the same investor call, another analyst pointed out that Nvidia would likely achieve an incredible $50 to $60 billion in AI GPU sales in 2025, while AMD might just hit $10 billion at best.

Still, however you slice it anything specifically to do with gaming feels like awfully small beer for AMD these days. Revenues for its “Gaming” business, which includes not only gaming graphics cards for PCs but also the custom AMD-engineered APUs inside the Xbox and PlayStation consoles, amounted to just $462 million in the most recent quarter.

That represents just 6.8% of AMD’s overall revenues. And shrinking. Likewise, AMD’s CPUs for desktop and laptop PCs pulled in nearly $2 billion over the same period.

It does all make you wonder how motivated AMD can be when it comes to GPUs for PCs when there’s so much more money to be made elsewhere. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that the AI GPU market will continue to boom. And graphics chips for PCs are a long-term core competence for AMD.

So, here’s hoping AMD is fully committed to improving its gaming graphics. We’ll find out soon enough when it comes to AMD’s next-gen cards, what with Lisa Su confirming that RDNA 4, likely in the form of the Radeon RX 8800 XT, will arrive “early” in 2025.