AMD’s record third quarter featured a 97 percent surge in data center revenue as EPYC processors and Instinct GPUs gained momentum, while MI455X, Helios and Venice deployments helped strengthen the chipmaker’s AI infrastructure position, Chair and CEO Lisa Su told financial analysts.
AMD had its largest and most profitable quarter in its history in the third fiscal quarter of 2026 as it continued ramping its next-generation AI, hyperscaler, and data center products, according to Chair and CEO Lisa Su.
Su, in her prepared remarks for the company’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts, said data center products revenue grew 97 percent over last year to a record $8.5 billion, or 64 percent of total revenue, up from 47 percent a year earlier. Su said server cloud and enterprise sales both more than doubled, well above AMD’s previous outlook of more than 80 percent growth.
In the cloud, Su said hyperscalers deployed substantial volumes of EPYC servers, particularly its fifth-generation EPYC “Turin” models, and AI agents are a big reason why.
[Related: AMD Commits $250M To Nutanix To Accelerate Enterprise Agentic AI Infrastructure]
“Turin is now the most widely deployed EPYC generation in the public cloud, with more than 540 instance types available globally from the largest providers,” she said. “Cloud providers also 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.”
Su said Santa Clara, Calif.-based AMD also won major head node deployments with several of the largest model developers and cloud providers. OpenAI, for instance, selected EPYC Turin processors as host CPUs for its first custom accelerator platforms.
In the enterprise, EPYC server sell-through was a record, and AMD added dozens of first-time customers in financial services, communications, retail, and healthcare. Su also said AMD’s sixth-generation EPYC Venice processors are also off to a fast start.
“We began revenue shipments of EPYC Venice processors in the third quarter, and the first OEM systems are on track for availability this quarter,” she said. “Early demand is the strongest we have seen for any new EPYC generation. Our OEM and ODM partners have committed more than 240 Venice platforms, 20 percent more than Turin, and cloud providers are deploying Venice this quarter ahead of instance rollouts planned for early 2027.”
AMD also launched Helion, a Venice reference design for turnkey EPYC rack-scale systems. A single all-CPU Helion rack holds up to 144 Venice processors with nearly 74,000 threads, and every major server OEM and ODM plans to offer it, with first systems shipping this quarter, Su said.
AMD Instinct MI455X, Helios AI Deployments Ramp
On the AI side, Su said AMD’s Instinct GPU deployments expanded for both inference and training, driving a record growth in revenue and opening the way for the company’s Helios rack-scale AI and high-performance computing platform.
“We started shipping [Instinct] MI455X in volume in the quarter, and lead customers including Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle brought their first Helios racks online quickly,” she said. “Customers are now running their latest models and workloads on Helios, and we are seeing very strong performance with the initial deployments.”
Su said she expects Helios deployments to rise substantially in the fourth quarter as HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro, and other partners begin shipping systems.
AMD also announced acquisitions of Taalas, a developer of specialized silicon built for low-latency, efficient inference, and World Labs, a developer of spatial intelligence and models that understand the physical world. Both are expected to close by year-end, Su said.
AMD Sees PC Market Falling Double Digits In 2027
The picture was less rosy in client and gaming, where revenue fell from last year, Su said. She cautioned about the PC market ahead.
“Looking at the market, PC sell-through slowed late in the quarter as higher memory and component costs weighed on demand,” she said. “We are managing the business accordingly, aligning sell-in with sell-through to keep customer and channel inventory healthy. In 2027, we are planning for PC market unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage. In this environment, we expect to outperform the market as we deliver our Ryzen roadmap and grow our commercial footprint.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su On Data Center Demand And Supply
When asked by an analyst during the question-and-answer portion of the conference call about whether demand for AMD’s products would outstrip supply if the company could get more of the components it needed, Su replied her company has spent a significant amount of time with customers discussing their deployments and deployment schedules. AMD is also working with its supply chain partners to ensure it has the necessary wafers, substrates, advanced packaging, memory, and other components.
Su said AMD continues to work with its supply chain partners to increase supply and sees a good opportunity to do so given its strong ecosystem relationships, and that it expects to grow its server and data center business.
“We continue to have strong visibility, and we see strong demand from our customers,” she said. “And we continue to see also good follow-through on all of the other aspects of the infrastructure that are needed. So overall, we’re very positive about the data center growth into 2027.”
When asked about AMD’s lower expectations for its client business, Su said the PC market continues to be an important market to her company despite its expected sub-seasonal second half of the year.
“Our view is this is one of those times when component prices go up, it affects overall system pricing,” she said. “One would expect the consumer markets to be more sensitive to that, and so we have seen a bit of slowdown in the sell-through. We’re just managing the business very, very prudently, and we want to ensure that inventory stays healthy throughout the channel and throughout our customers. And so our planning assumption for 2027 is that the market will be double-digit percentage down.”
When asked whether AMD expects its customers to have access to the financing and land needed to continue the roughly 3 gigawatts of planned AMD data center deployments expected in 2027, Su said she feels extremely good about her company’s competitiveness in this market.
“We have been planning for this ramp with our customers jointly, so we have good visibility into 2027 land, power, shelves, all of those, the data center infrastructure, and we are very much working hand-in-hand with our customers,” she said. “So we know where the GPUs are going in terms of which data centers and which locations and all of that stuff.”
AMD Vs. Intel: What A Channel Partner Says
AMD is doing pretty well, said Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Nor-Tech, a Burnsville, Minn.-based custom system builder that works with AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.
“It’s good to see,” Daninger told CRN. “I always like to have decent competition out there for Intel. We’ve seen Intel up and down many times over the years, and hopefully they get their skids greased and start doing better. We’ll see what happens.”
AMD financial results show the company’s strengths even as its technology has been popping up in more of Nor-Tech’s clusters, Daninger said.
“AMD has a price-performance argument that is hard to beat in many cases,” he said.
AMD has also been pretty good about supplying sample parts for demonstration clusters both for new customers and customers who have been working with Nor-Tech for 15 or 20 years, Daninger said.
AMD CPU supplies have been good, Daninger said. However, he said, the bigger problem for the server business has been the shortage of 32-GB DIMM memory modules.
“That is the optimum size for a lot of either AMD or Intel servers these days,” he said. “So, yeah, the biggest issue is the memory, not so much the CPUs. CPU supply seems to be OK. It’s not like you get AMD CPUs the next day. We just had a situation where we had to get a replacement part for one of our customers in India. It probably took 10 days or something like that, which is not bad.”
AMD Q3 2026 Earnings: Revenue, Profit And Outlook
For its third fiscal quarter 2026, which ended September 26, AMD reported total revenue of $13.38 billion, up about 45 percent over the $9.25 billion the company reported for its third fiscal quarter 2025.
That included data center segment revenue of $8.55 billion, up from last year’s $4.34 billion; client segment revenue of $2.95 billion, up from $2.75 billion; and gaming segment revenue of $773 million, down from $1.30 billion.
Total revenue beat analyst estimates by $290 million, according to Seeking Alpha.
For the quarter, AMD also reported GAAP net income of $2.43 billion or $1.46 per share, nearly double the $1.24 billion or 75 cents per share the company reported last year. On a non-GAAP basis, the company reported net income of $3.47 billion or $2.09 per share, up from last year’s $1.97 billion or $1.20 per share.
Non-GAAP net income beat analyst expectations by 15 cents per share, according to Seeking Alpha.
Looking ahead, AMD expects fourth fiscal quarter 2026 revenue to be about $17 billion plus or minus 3 percent. At the midpoint of the revenue range, that would represent year-over-year growth of 66 percent. The company also expects non-GAAP gross margins of about 55 percent for its fourth fiscal quarter 2026.
