AMD’s Fast Data Center Growth Extends To Enterprise Amid Big Channel Push

That fast enterprise growth is happening as AMD makes a renewed effort to fight Intel in the channel with a restructured commercial partner program, which received a 40 percent increase in funding and saw a 50 percent boost in VAR coverage last year.

AMD smashed its own expectations for first-quarter revenue in large part thanks to a 57 percent year-over-year increase in data center sales, which not only got a boost from its Instinct GPUs but also from its EPYC CPUs in the face of pent-up AI demand.

This allowed the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company to grow its data center revenue to a record $5.8 billion—once again higher than what its larger rival, Intel, made for the segment. The figure represented roughly 56 percent of its total revenue, which grew 38 percent year over year to $10.3 billion in the first quarter.

AMD’s stock price was up more than 14 percent in after-hours trading.

With AMD blowing past its original $9.8 billion forecast and the average estimate by Wall Street analysts, the chip designer reported a fourth consecutive quarter of record server CPU revenue, with sales to cloud service providers and enterprise customers each growing by more than 50 percent year over year.

Dominic Daninger, vice president of engineering at Burnsville, Minn.-based systems integrator Nor-Tech, told CRN that he is taking note of the increased partner coverage with a new AMD sales representative providing additional assistance to his company.

“He obviously handles a lot of the areas that we have most of our business in, and he’s been helpful here, so it’s looking more positive,” the vice president said.

While Daninger said Nor-Tech has “had a lot of wins” with AMD’s EPYC CPUs for high-performance computing customers, he is concerned that AMD may not be fully recognizing his company’s contributions to CPU sales though its work with OEMs. This could have implications for how AMD determines financial incentives for partners.

“They’ve got a lot of growth going on there, and not all the wires are quite connected yet,” he said.

Like Intel, AMD Says AI Agents Are Creating Big CPU Appetite

AMD’s report of strong server CPU demand, driven by what its CEO, Lisa Su, called a “rapid scaling of AI workloads,” comes less than two weeks after Intel disclosed high customer interest in the same segment for the same reasons.

“Inferencing and agentic AI are increasing the need for server CPU compute, as these workloads require additional CPU processing for orchestration, data movement and parallel execution, in addition to serving as the head nodes for GPUs and accelerators,” Su said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

This has resulted in AMD seeing “both stronger near-term demand and deeper engagement with customers on long-term capacity planning,” the CEO added. It also prompted AMD to reconsider the total addressable market for server CPUs, now forecasting it to grow more than 35 percent annually to reach over $120 billion by 2030.

The $120 billion figure is more than triple what AMD and Intel made in data center revenues last year combined. The forecast also doesn’t include its sales expectations for its Instinct GPUs, for which Su reported “deeper, long-term customer engagements.”

Su indicated that a lot of this growth is coming from the rise of agentic AI workloads, which is prompting the CPU-to-GPU ratio in new data centers to shift from one CPU for every four or eight GPUs, which had been the norm for the past few years, to one CPU for every GPU.

Intel also cited agentic AI as a primary driver for server CPU sales growth.

“The key is that everyone is now planning and thinking about CPUs at the same time that they’re thinking about their accelerator deployments, which is a good thing,” she said.

Su Notes EPYC Momentum With Mid-Market, SMB Customers

With AMD seeing its server CPU revenue growing more than 50 percent year over year in the first quarter, Su reported record revenue and sell-through with enterprise customers.

While she noted new customer deals for EPYC across the financial services, health care, industrial and digital infrastructure sectors, the CEO also mentioned that the company is “building momentum with mid-market and SMB customers.”

The company has made an increased effort to reach customers in the latter two segments through its expanded work with channel partners over the past year or so.

“We are well-positioned to continue gaining share as more enterprises standardize on EPYC across on-prem and hybrid environments based on our leadership performance and TCO,” Su said in the earnings call.

AMD Expects To ‘Outperform’ PC Market Despite Memory Shortage Impact

Within the PC market, Su called out the commercial segment as a “key highlight in the quarter” with sell-through of commercial PCs powered by its Ryzen Pro processors “growing by more than 50 percent year over year.”

She said this was happening in tandem with Dell Technologies, HP Inc. and Lenovo all broadening their AMD-based offerings.

However, Su warned that the company expects PCs in the second half of this year “to be lower due to higher memory and component costs,” referring to the impact of ongoing shortages driven by the continuing buildout of AI data centers.

Even then, the CEO said AMD still expects client revenue “to grow year-over-year and outperform the market, driven by the strength of our Ryzen portfolio and expanding commercial adoption.”

AMD Continues To See Instinct GPU Momentum Without Channel’s Help

Revenue from AMD’s Instinct GPUs in the first quarter grew by a “significant double-digit percentage year over year,” according to Su, who cited an acceleration of adoption across cloud, enterprise, sovereign and supercomputing customers.

“We are seeing strong momentum as customers move from pilots to large-scale production deployments, particularly in inference where our leadership memory capacity and bandwidth are key advantages,” she said.

While the company has been doubling down on the channel to grow its CPU businesses, it has held off so far from making a meaningful push with channel partners to drive Instinct GPU sales, largely so it can focus on large deployments with marquee customers such as Meta and OpenAI, AMD sales executive Kevin Lensing told CRN in an interview last year.

“With this expanded visibility, we have strong and increasing confidence in our ability to deliver tens of billions of dollars in annual data center AI revenue in 2027 and to exceed our long-term growth target of greater than 80 percent in the coming years,” Su said.