AMD had record sales of $13.4 billion in its third quarter, the three months to Sept. 26, up 45% from a year earlier, it said on Nov. 3. Its data center business, whose sales rose 97% to a record $8.5 billion, accounted for all of that growth and more, since its PC and gaming sales fell. AMD credits demand for its EPYC processors, the main chips that run servers, and the launch of its new Instinct MI450 AI chips. The data center business now brings in close to two thirds of AMD's sales.
AMD's Instinct chips are GPUs, advanced AI chips, the hardware AI models are trained and run on. AMD also sells them in Helios, a ready-built, cabinet-sized rack of computing hardware that combines Instinct chips with EPYC processors. AMD says Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle's cloud business are running AI models and other work on the first Helios racks.
For its fourth quarter, the three months to late December, AMD expects sales of about $17 billion, give or take 3%. That would be about 66% more than a year earlier and 27% more than the quarter just ended. Chief executive Lisa Su said AMD expects growth to speed up further this quarter as it makes more Helios racks. On a call with analysts, Su said AMD expects its total sales to grow more than 80% in 2027, according to a news report.
Not all of AMD grew. Sales in its PC and gaming business fell 8% to $3.7 billion. PC chip sales rose 7% to $2.9 billion, but gaming sales fell 40% to $773 million, which AMD puts down to lower sales of graphics chips and of chips it designs for other companies' products. The cash AMD's business brought in during the quarter, after its spending on equipment, also fell by almost two thirds from a year earlier, to $554 million.
AMD says sales of both its AI chips and its server processors were records, but it gives no figure for either, so its results do not show how fast its AI chip sales alone grew. AMD warns that its forecast could prove wrong, naming risks that include the supply of parts such as memory.