AMD on Tuesday reported third-quarter revenue of a record $13.4 billion, up 45 percent year over year, as the data center business nearly doubled and the company’s gaming segment slumped.
AMD Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu said: “We expect revenue to be approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. The midpoint of our guidance represents approximately 66% year-over-year revenue growth, driven primarily by the acceleration of our data center segment.” AMD says its fourth-quarter revenue projections increase another 27 percent from this quarter’s results. As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Intel’s guidance for the fourth quarter puts revenue estimates between $15 and $16 billion. That means if both companies land where they expect at the end of the fourth quarter, AMD would surpass Intel’s revenue for the first time in history.
The data center segment of AMD’s business increased 97 percent year over year, to a record $8.5 billion. AMD attributes the growth to demand for its EPYC line of enterprise server CPUs, along with the launch of the Instinct MI450 series GPUs. Sales of AMD Ryzen mobile chips led growth in the Client business, which includes desktop Ryzen processors, posting $2.95 billion in revenue, up 7 percent year over year.
Gaming revenue fell sharply for the company, posting a 40 percent drop in revenue to $773 million, which AMD attributes to “lower graphics and semi-custom revenue.” Operating margins in AMD’s data center business expanded from 25 percent to 34 percent, with operating income increasing 168 percent to $2.88 billion.
Revenue from the embedded segment, or all SoCs, FPGAs and boards under the AMD umbrella that go into other hardware, was $1.1 billion, an increase of 29 percent. AMD attributed this growth to advances made in the “aerospace and defense, automotive, communications, and industrial end markets.”
