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AMD at Citi Global TMT Conference – Jean Hu (CFO) & Matt Ramsay – September 2026
Q&A Section:
Atif Malik: I'll kick it off with my questions first. If you have a question, save it towards the end. We'll have the mic come to you, and you can ask your question. Welcome, guys. Jean, if you can take us through the lay of the land. It's been an exciting year, what has changed from January till now, you guys had your big AI Day as well, you raised your TAM forecast. Just kind of walk us through how the demand picture has evolved from January onwards.
Jean Hu: Yeah. First, thank you for having us, and it's great to be here. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Yeah, it has been a really exciting year. They had so many different changes in our industry, and it's really about AI, and we do believe this is the most consequential technology transformation. When you think about the pace, the scale, and the price for the AI, it's unprecedented, right? When you look at this year, not only the model capabilities continue to advancing very quickly, we also see inferencing at pace trending from AI compute demand perspective, and agentic AI, that's another thing which really have another step change in demand, not only just for GPUs but for CPUs.
So, during our Advanced AI Day, we did update our market opportunities from, in the past, you know, a small number to now $2 trillion, $3 trillion in 2030. We do see the demand for our product, and not only just the GPUs but the CPUs and the AI PC and in the future fiscal AI for our adaptive compute across all different areas. And the most exciting thing is we just reported the Q2 results, and we talk about our data center business expect to double next year, our GPU business continue to ramp, MI450, we're going to launch this quarter at the very beginning of the ramp, then we're going to see very significant ramp in Q4 and into next year. And on the CPU side, you know, it was a supply constraint, but we have been increasing supply, so we do expect the second half, the CPU business is going to expand more than 80% year-over-year and into next year continue to expand more than 70%, which should continue to be supply constrained. So it's very exciting time for AMD.
When you think about it, the company has been very aggressively investing in high-performance compute for more than a decade. As you know, we have been building methodically the compute platform from CPU, GPU to adaptive compute across all different end market. We think that most different thing, this AI super investment cycle is at the very beginning, and over time, we're going to continue to see strong demand for AMD's product. And the portfolio we have built will benefit from this AI super investment cycle.
Atif Malik: Great. Matt, Jean talked about inference being a big driver of demand, and we've been hearing about this disaggregated compute kind of a shift in the market, the Hot Chips Conference, and you guys, you know, struck a partnership with Cerebras, more recently, you've acquired Taalas. Can you kind of talk us through what your strategy is on the infant side and how you're thinking about these different pieces of the different type of infants' units?
Matt Ramsay: Sure. And thank you, all, for, and, Atik, thank you, and the folks at Citi for hosting us and for everyone to come and see us. And then maybe this ties a little bit into some of the stuff that Jean talked about in your prior question about what's changed in the market in the last 12 months. It seems like a lot. We were waiting for inference to become the majority driver of AI computing, and I think that's happened, and at the same time that that's happened, we've seen this radical change from what I kind of call chat bot inference to agentic inference, and that's really created big opportunities for both inferencing silicon and for the CPUs to run the agents.
We've talked about in a number of forums, obviously, the breadth of the inference market will be the majority of it driven by GPU-led computing and our MI455 product is going to be ramping now with Helios, and we have a road map to continue to innovate there. There's obviously different ASICs and XPUs in the market that are going to do some of the inferencing work, and there's this new sort of market for disaggregated inference and ultra-fast response time tokens that's a relatively small piece of the market today, but I think depending on economics could grow into a larger piece over time.
So we've taken a multi sort of pronged approach to the problem. One is a partnership that we have announced with Cerebras, where our Helios systems will be in their cloud and compute alongside their wafer scale engine racks to expand the utility not just of ultra-fast inference, but take it to a broader range of more general purpose inference in their cloud for their customers. And then longer term, we do have – we haven't given a ton of details yet, but we do have some of our own internal silicon ambitions for ultra-low-latency inference that would fit into our architecture via chiplets.
And the Taalas team brings a lot of really good talents. We know the folks well, some of them are former AMD/ATI folks back in the day and are going to integrate really quickly into the team and add a lot of technology and horsepower behind the internal silicon work we're doing in that area.
Atif Malik: Awesome. Jean, let's talk about Helios. I believe you guys already had very high expectations on Helios exiting last year. But just in terms of your shipments and where you stand on Helios, how should we think about the ramp of Helios in Q4 and then to Q1 next year? How is that ramp going? I do hear from clients around questions and our execution, if you guys can just help us understand.
Jean Hu: Yeah. I would say the Helios ramp, MI450 ramp, is going very well. Q3 will be the, at the very beginning of our production shipment. We expect revenue in Q3, but Q4, we'll see a very significant step up, and then another step up in Q1 2027, and the ramp through 2027. It is a skill level, rack-scale level, right? It's very different, very complex. So, we have been very methodical and deliberate how we design the ramp process. You know, start to ramp in the end of Q3 and the step up in Q1 – Q4, Q1 in 2027. We are working with all our partners, ODM partners, and our overall supply chain to ensure we have all the component. So it's not about the GPU, CPU, HBM memory. There are also a lot of other small component that we need to ensure we have.
And with the ODM partners, it had been a long, really, really durable work with them to make sure the manufacturing process can execute. That's why it's a methodical process. It's – our team have been working with the ODM partners, we also have been working with all the customers. We're going to have a production shipment to ensure not only all the component works, all the mechanical, all the software stack, everything works. So that has been ongoing. It's a weekly execution process. We actually feel pretty good about the ramp, both on the supply side.
The demand and volume for 2027 certainly go above our original initial expectation. We need to continue to expand the supply. We feel good about the financial plan. We have talked about it, but it's absolutely the case. We can use more supplies to make sure we meet the customers' demand.
Atif Malik: Just the customer profile, you guys had Meta and Microsoft as two customers last year. You're growing that demand further this year, and then you added Anthropic as a customer. So can you just talk about that customer funnel? Particularly touch on the neocloud opportunity, if that's an emerging area for you, and also touch on the dollar per gigawatt across that range of customers.
Jean Hu: Yeah. So, we're really pleased with our strategic long-term partnership with Anthropic we launched. When you have Anthropic, basically, we have three major anchor customers: Meta and OpenAI and Anthropic. And all three of them, the deployment are going to be, you know, multiple gigawatt, a scale deployment, and demand a generational engagement data all for them.
When you think about our customer pipeline, not only all three of them came as the forecast more than what we expected in the beginning of the strategic partnership. Of course, we need to make sure we have supplies to support them. But more importantly, MI350, we have seen a tremendous demand from all the other third-party customers. The model builders, the new AI companies, even the enterprise customers. So we do think the neocloud continue to be the area we're going to work with to make sure we meet all the other and the customers' need. The pipeline's quite significant. For us, we really need to prioritize. We want to make sure we support the three major anchor customers for large-scale deployment, but at the same time, you should expect us to work with neocloud to make sure we support all the other customers in the market.
Matt Ramsay: I think one thing I would add to what Jean mentioned is it's not – when we think about these programs, we don't just think about it as what's going to happen with Helios and MI455 over the next 12, 15, 18 months. It's the engineering level and technical engagement that's influencing what the MI500 program would look like, the MI600 program would look like, what the design of the future racks would look like. The amount of technical engagement across these – the three leading model companies that we've announced as customers so far, that's – it's really heartening to see that influence the road map over a multigenerational period and think that gives us confidence in terms – not just where our road map is going, but what that engagement level is going to look like over the next – through the end of the decade, right, over multiple generations.
And we saw the same thing happen. It's a very different time and a different market, but the same thing happened on the CPU side six or seven years ago, right, where people were announcing partnerships with AMD on the Rome generation, but it was really influenced by what they saw and their level of influence in the road map of multiple generations going forward from there, and I think that's kind of where we are now with the AI business.
Atif Malik: Great. Jean, the MI series is below corporate average on gross margin side. And how should we think about the ramp and the move to MI355 to MI500 in the future, and the impact to your gross margin expectations next year?
Jean Hu: Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think data center AI, MI450, and the future generation, it's one for the most significant growth drivers in our data center business. What it's going to help us is to drive very significant incremental revenue and gross profit growth in next year and beyond.
And even though the gross margin percentage right now is still a bit below corporate average, but the way to think about it is we actually have a broad portfolio at a company level. So we always talk about the gross margin is being driven by the mix of our different product portfolio. And one of the things is going into Q4 and 2027, even though we're ramping MI450 significantly, but we do have some tailwinds on the gross margin side that help us. I think in the first one is the server CPU business. When you think about the server CPU business, right now, within our data center, it's a still larger portion of our business, and it's actually going to continue to grow. We expect second half to be more than 80% year-over-year increase, and the next year more than 70%. So, from that perspective, that business is gross margin accretive to corporate average, so we do see that is going to help to offset some of the dilution from data center AI business.
Secondly, our embedded business, after three years of inventory digestion, we have seen significant double-digit year-over-year increase not only in Q2. We also guided in Q3 and going forward. So, the business recovery is very broad based in embedded business, and we are also winning a lot of design wins with our embedded x86 business in data center in networking, and all those business are margin accretive to us.
Third thing is probably small, but our gaming business, which tends to be the lower gross margin, which is at a later stage of the product cycle, and the memory cost is pretty high right now, which also impact the demand side. So the mix from a gross margin perspective, actually, we do have all those tailwinds. In general, the way to think about it is, when we ramp MI450 in Q4 and 2027, the gross margin will be slightly lower than what we guided the Q3. Q3, we actually guided our gross margin at 56%. You have seen where expanding gross margin things last year when we actually are ramping MI350.
So going forward, gross margin in 2027, quarter-over-quarter will be different. But the most important thing is the way to think about our business model is we are driving very significant data center revenue expansion, and the gross margin dollars expansion, which our investment, an OpEx increase is slower than revenue and gross profit increase, which is going to drive very significant operating leverage and earnings per share expansion.
Atif Malik: Very clear. Let's talk about the server CPUs. When I visited you guys in, I believe it was January something for bus store, you know, some bulb turned on in terms of the CPU demand this year. And you guys were just talking about not finding enough CPUs internally to do Agentic AI yourself. So kind of walk us through – and now the TAM is like $20 billion by 2030, and can you just talk about your aspirations around market share in the server CPU market? What have you seen so far, x86 versus arm? And it's just your aspirations on market share.
Jean Hu: Yeah. I will start, and the math can \[indiscernible\] at ease, it's actually astonishing when you think about surfer CPU market at TAM to be at $60 billion in 2030. That time, Agentic AI was, at the very last Financial Analyst Day in November 2025, we talk about silver CPU market TAM to be at $60 billion in 2030. In that time agentic AI was at the very early beginning, and, really, agentic adoption, the diffusion into the business enterprise has been – the curve has been tremendous. So we see that agentic AI adoption very significantly starting January, and just continue to be like almost like a vertical in enterprise market, which, that's one that demand for CPU continue to increase, because as Matt mentioned earlier, when you think about agentic AI, it's about workflow execution. In enterprise, that really requires retrieving data, executer orchestration, all those are being done on the CPUs.
So not only you needed to go back to your foundational CPUs to rank all the tasks, to make \[indiscernible\] every other compute. That market has been discontinued to increase. We can see the demand continue to go up. That's why where we have just updated our TAM opportunity so to more than $220 billion from $25 billion in 2025. That is how significant an expansion has been is we see more than 50% CAGR in next several years, largely driven by Agentic AI.
They are different segment is the way to think about it is, you do have the foundational CPU segment which handles all your enterprise applications, your SAP, your database, that continue to grow. But the growth is probably not as big as the other segment.
Then there's the high note part called \[indiscernible\] with the GPUs that continue to grow. But the largest is Agentic AI, send the box, which is very small today, but it's going to be more than 50% of now the $220 billion market. And we do think it's not only about ASP increase, the unit will increase very significantly, too. So the market opportunities are tremendous, and we are very well positioned as the company from investment perspective.
Matt Ramsay: Yeah. And just to add a couple of points, Jean, we feel like the road map is in about the best place that it's ever been in the server business. I think you're – I don't if you asked the question around instruction sets of x86 versus versus arm, just to be clear, I mean, there are areas in – particularly in the enterprise server applications, where x86 legacy is very important. There are broad applicability, not really of instruction set, but of experience in security features, reliability, serviceability, like really enterprise and cloud great features that we have in the sixth or seventh generation of the road map that are quite important, but we also feel like our own differentiation and our competitive lead in the server business will expand with this pretty significantly. I mean, it's a very, very compelling program, and the amount of demand and visibility that we have in the server business is very significant from what it's been historically.
And I think that – I think we get asked about competition a lot, and I think our approach to this is not an x86 thing or an Arm thing. It's a build the best server parts. Period. I mean, that's the priority of the business. And I think if we do that, we can give differentiate in the agentic world of threads per rack or threads per megawatt, we can give over 5 gigahertz products that go into head nodes. We can have broad applicability across the enterprise stack, whether that's on prem or in the cloud.
You know, one of the fascinating – you mentioned some of the growth rates, but one of the fascinating stats to me, having been in the server industry since 2000 is, I mean, our enterprise server business grew more than 70% in the second quarter. I mean, it used to be heroic if you had double-digit growth in enterprise server, and now we're talking about 70% growth. So it's a really broad-based portfolio, and I think the – going from the Venice generation into Florence and Ravenna and beyond that, I think that we do intend to, the much larger TAM that Jean described, we do intend to grow to 50% of that dollar TAM, inclusive of all instruction sets of competition. And when you do the math and you talk about building $100 billion server business, and that's what we're intending to do.
Atif Malik: Great. Jean, let's talk about supply. This topic just never dies. You guys have talked about the $70 billion in data center sales next year and low $40 billion GPU and the remaining CPU, you saw purchase commitments, $29 billion, $30 billion. Just, and, I mean, we can all track and hear about TSMC's allocation and you guys are seeing the biggest jump next year, but just help us understand what are the limitations around supply and your ability to upside next year?
Jean Hu: I think overall supply is very tight. There are multiple areas not only wafers, advanced process node, HBM, Kite Packaging substrate on some of the components are very tight. We do have an excellent supply chain team. Operationally, we have been working with the whole supply chain to ensure we can support our top line revenue growth. On the data center AI side, MI450, we have been preparing for the ramp for a long time. So the way to think about it is we have been working with the whole ecosystem to ensure not only we have wafers, HBM, and also advanced packaging capacity as well as all the different components to support the Helios rack level solutions. That has been ongoing, and now, the demand continue to go up. So we absolutely needed to get more supplies.
On the server CPU side, you know, as Matt and I talk about it, is it's actually the demand start to accelerate this year. So we did need to catch up. During the process, so for the first half, we have continued to increase the supply from wafers perspective, from advanced packaging capacity perspective, and we continue to invest aggressively. We talk about our CapEx increase, the primary increase of CapEx is to build the capacity to support to the CPU ramp, like especially Venice, as Matt talked about that we do see very significant ramp next year, and we are actually – capacity is not enough. We need to build ourselves to buy the equipment to do the consignment to support the ramp.
So right now, we actually feel really good about all the supply chain work we have done to ensure we can support the data center revenue to double next year and also to ensure the embedded is get the supplies to still to be very significant growth in 2027. PC and gaming, we prioritize, but we absolutely want to make sure we continue to gain share in the PC market, too. So we feel pretty good, but I would say we can have more supplies, demand continue to increase.
Atif Malik: Awesome. Let me pause there and see if there are any questions in the audience. If you have a question, please raise your hand. All right, let's move on. Yeah
Audience Question: The CPU side, can you talk about maybe price? I think, like, Intel's been taking more price because it had older products, and just wanted to get your thoughts on price and how you guys see price evolving over the next couple of years.
Jean Hu: Yeah. I think first, \[ph\] Jase, that when we talk about our significant CPU growth, it increased both because of unit increase and the ASP increase. Unit increase is probably small, and ASP increase, when you think about the ASP increase for us, the call counts have been going up for each generation. So, in general, that will drive the ASP increase. And your question into the future when you really think about it is the way AMD – we think about how we work with our customers is we absolutely need to make sure we get the gross margin to continue to invest in the future. But in general, if there's a component cost to increase, we do need to make sure we share that cost to increase with the customers.
So, for instance, if there's a wafer price increase, we absolutely want to make sure we share that with the customers, and if the wafer price increase, you should expect us to increase CPU price, too. But in general, that is how we are operating. We really want to make sure we provide customers with the best TCO and have a long-term strategic relationship with them. And our gross margin really is important to us, but we're not going to increase the price just to expand the gross margin.
Audience Question: Thank you very much for your time. As scale-up domain gets bigger, at what point does copper stop being good enough, and when does that – when does optics have to move inside the package?
Matt Ramsay: Yeah. Thank you for the question. We have not disclosed a ton about the road map in this area, but we have disclosed some. And at our advancing AI conference a couple of months ago, we did talk about in the MI500 series program, which would be for the second half of 2027, introduction and be kind of the primary product for the company in 2028, that we will have scale-up domains that are larger than we're offering now. So we haven't set a number, but greater than 72, and that we would have both copper-based and near package optics based options for scale-up connectivity. We're still going to run our infinity fabric traffic, which is the coherency protocol that we use to communicate between CPUs and GPUs, so – and that technology was donated into the industry consortium, the UAO. And so, we're still going to be doing traffic tunneled over both Ethernet and other means on copper and over optics.
I don't think you'll see it be a point in time thing where everybody just decides as an industry, okay, no more copper, now we're going to go optics. It's not going to be a student body left type of decision, you're going to see the technologies run in parallel, and different versions of optics will be introduced with different risk tolerances over time. So I guess that's a long way of saying we're going to start on that path in the products in 2027, and we'll give you guys more updates as we go forward. But you should think about copper and optics living side-by-side for a number of generations. It's not going to be a binary shift. We have partners.
Audience Question: \[indiscernible\] I mean, especially what we're seeing in the private markets.
Jean Hu: On the MA, environment, right, we have been doing bolt-on acquisitions, which really focus on the software capability, so we want to add. Of course, we acquired ZT Systems a while ago, which was to prepare the system-level expertise to get the talent capabilities there. I think that you should expect us to continue to focus on those areas, make sure we not only increase the capabilities of just building the system solutions but also the software side, the stack, the model to make sure we continue to invest for the AI.
Audience Question: Is there any scenario under which you could – would consider using Intel as a foundry partner?
Jean Hu: Thank you for the question. So I think, as you know, most of you know, right, we have a long strategic partnership with TSMC. We have been working with TSMC for a very long term, not only just from a – they are as a supplier, but on the R&D side, if you look at a lot of our technology, we actually co-developed with the TSMC. And for us, the most important thing, when you look at our scale and the volume, the most important thing is that we want to make sure the quality of the product, the advanced process technology, the 3D packaging, everything we are doing, it can be supported by our suppliers.
We definitely, you know, we have a fab in Arizona, we're diversifying from geolocation perspective with them, but you should expect us to continue to view TSMC as our primary supplier on the wafer side.
Matt Ramsay: Yeah. I think you should view us as – I mean, anything that's advanced packaging or anything that's advanced wafers, we're going to evaluate in due diligence on technology from every vendor in the market. But as Jean said, for the foreseeable future, I mean, the partnership we have with TSMC is going to be a significant one and will continue to be for a long time.
Audience Question: Think about your competitive positioning versus NVIDIA and proprietary ASICs. Where do you feel AMD has the clearest performance cost or availability advantage at this time? Thank you.
Matt Ramsay: I think what you're seeing right now in market is, and Lisa and Vamsi and others at the company have talked about this very publicly, is we feel like we have for, in today's generation of product, tokens per dollar advantages or large-scale inference that we're going to be bringing to market and deploying in large volume with OpenAI, with Meta, and with Anthropic. And over time, and in through multiple generations, we're expanding our training capability with the MI450 series, we'll expand it further with generations beyond that. But as you think about things in market today and what we're going to be ramping significantly over the next number of quarters, we feel like there's a – our customers are great, great partners with us, but they do expect us to generate economic – differentiated economic returns for them in terms of tokens per dollar, and that's what the market is demanding of us, and that's what we think the product delivers.
But when we talk about the entire breadth of the AI market, whether that be some level of customization, whether it be merchant computing, whether it be the server CPUs that run the agents, we intend to participate in all of that. And it might not look the same at every single customer, but I think we can bring at significant scale technologies across DPU, CPU, custom, scale-up optics and networking and system-level design across the board, so – but where we differentiate the most today is in large-scale inference.
Atif Malik: Great. We're almost out of time. Jean and Matt, thank you for coming to the Citi Conference.
Jean Hu & Matt Ramsay: Thank you. Thank you, guys.
Note: Transcript contains \[indiscernible\] markers where audio was unclear. Minor transcription errors may be present (e.g., "surfer CPU" = server CPU, "infant" = inference, "fiscal AI" = edge AI).