AMD talks up sustainability efforts with rack-scale energy efficiency gains

AMD has boosted rack efficiency four-fold since 2024, and the company claims it’s on track to upping it by 20 times by the end of the decade.

The chipmaker revealed it recently exceeded its 2026 target of a three-fold improvement in rack-scale energy efficiency for AI training and inference.

Two 2030 AMD racks are now expected to deliver the same compute as roughly 570 racks did in 2024, enabling a 20x reduction in use-phase electricity and a 28x reduction in carbon intensity.

Alternatively, efficiency gains are expected to enable 20-times more compute, measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPs) per watt, using the same amount of energy.

AMD said energy improved energy efficiency delivers a range of environmental benefits, but also in helping to improve AI performance without increasing power, improving total cost of ownership, and helping customers scale faster.

“The next wave of AI efficiency will depend on tighter co-optimization across compute silicon, memory, interconnects, software and rack-scale system design," said Sam Naffziger, senior vice president and corporate fellow at AMD.

"Our estimated 4x improvement through 2026 reflects the strength of our approach and the progress AMD is making across the full system, putting us ahead of our projected pace toward the 2030 goal.”

The improvements in performance come down to compute capability, memory bandwidth, and interconnect bandwidth, according to AMD.

Advanced process technology and architectural improvements help increase floating-point compute performance per watt, advanced architectures and memory integration improve bandwidth, and high-speed interconnects and tighter integration increase the network bandwidths.

High-bandwidth memory, larger caches, and tighter integration between memory and compute can reduce unnecessary data movement, which uses energy. Meanwhile, high-speed scale-up interconnects help larger systems reduce bottlenecks and share data more efficiently.

AMD’s ROCm software driving gains

Elsewhere, AMD claimed its ROCm software stack and open standards help developers and organizations deploy AI workloads more efficiently on AMD platforms, with open ecosystems also supporting broader optimization across AI and high-performance computing (HPC) deployments.

"The projected rack-scale efficiency gains AMD has set forth can enable AI and HPC customers to achieve data center-level gains in power and cooling infrastructure, which can be limiting factors to increasing compute performance," said the firm.

"Better energy efficiency can help reduce operational electricity use, improve total cost of ownership, and support more sustainable AI and HPC growth."

AMD has also published its 2025-26 Corporate Responsibility Report, detailing its progress across product efficiency, operations, supply chain responsibility, and community impact.

It reduced operational greenhouse gas emissions by 30% from 2020 to 2025, sourced 58% of global AMD electricity from renewable sources and audited 99% of its manufacturing supplier factories for responsible business practices.

"We aim to cut operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in half from 2020 to 2030 as we expand our use of renewable energy. In 2025, 100% of AMD manufacturing suppliers maintained public GHG reduction targets and 82% sourced renewable energy, said AMD chair and chief executive officer Lisa Su.

"The AI era is still in its early stages. Working closely with industry, government and academia, we will keep building the high-performance, energy-efficient compute foundation it requires."

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