AMD CEO Lisa Su hails ‘excellent quarter’ as data center sales underpin ‘record revenue and profitability’

AMD CEO Lisa Su has hailed the company’s record second quarter earnings as revenue surged 50% at the chipmaker.

Figures from AMD’s quarterly earnings report show revenue at the firm reached $11.54 billion, a sharp increase on the $7.69bn recorded in the same period last year.

“We delivered an excellent quarter, with record revenue and profitability as data center revenue more than doubled year-over-year,” Su said in a statement.

A key factor in this growth, the company noted, lies in surging data center hardware sales. Figures show revenue from its data center segment reached $6.7 billion, marking a 107% year-on-year increase.

“Revenue increased 50% year-over-year to a record $11.5 billion, driven by continued strength in our Data Center business, which represented 58% of company revenue in the quarter,” said Jean Hu, AMD’s executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO).

This revenue growth comes as the firm begins the roll-out of the Helios system, AMD’s first rack-scale AI architecture. The system combines Epyc CPUs, Instinct GPUs, Pensando networking, and Rocm software, and competes directly with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin rack.

As ITPro reported at AMD Advancing AI last month, a host of big tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Oracle have confirmed plans to purchase the system. AMD expects to ramp up shipments of Helios in the fourth quarter of 2026.

Advancing AI 2026 also saw the firm launch the new Instinct MI400 Series GPU family, as well as the sixth-generation Epyc CPU range.

AMD chief executive Lisa Su said the company expects continued demand for Helios as well as its flagship CPU and GPU ranges across the rest of 2026.

“We enter the second half with strong momentum as Epyc demand accelerates, Instinct deployments scale and Helios begins to ramp,” she said.

“More broadly, AI is driving a significant expansion in demand for compute across all of our markets, and our leadership portfolio and growing customer visibility position us exceptionally well to capture this expanding opportunity and deliver substantial revenue and earnings growth in the years ahead.”

AMD expects further data center growth

In an earnings call, Su told analysts the firm projects data center sales to double in 2027, with server revenue expected to surge around 80% in the second half of 2026.

“Demand for both accelerators and CPUs is growing well above our prior expectations,” she said. Demand for Epyc CPUs is also growing, with hyperscale providers flocking to the processor series.

“Hyperscalers continued expanding Epyc across their internal infrastructure and public cloud offerings, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and others,” Su added.

The AMD chief noted that heightened interest in Epyc processors has enabled the firm to capture market share from Intel, a key competitor on this front.

CPUs have become increasingly important for AI inference, particularly since the advent of agentic AI. As ITPro previously reported, GPU demand surged during the early days of the generative AI boom, powering AI training processes.

However, the processing demands placed on infrastructure by agents means CPUs and other specialized chips, such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), have grown in popularity.

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