AMD Catches The Agentic AI Wave And Will Ride It Up Masterfully
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AMD Catches The Agentic AI Wave And Will Ride It Up Masterfully
Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett<br>Morgan
Co-Editor, Co-Founder, The Next Platform
Published<br>wed 5 Aug 2026 // 14:59 UTC
AMD might not be taking any bites out of Nvidia’s market share when it comes to AI systems, but it is capturing its proportional share as the GenAI market expands with rapid inflation like the early universe did. But, we must remember that after the universe expanded in size, from about the size of a single subatomic particle to about the volume of a grapefruit in that first instance, the universe continued to evolve with bouts of punctuated equilibrium, where new conditions manifest and new elements of physics (literally as well as figuratively) emerged and everything changed several times over before reaching what feels like a steady state.<br>It was hard to play catch up with Intel in CPUs – twice – and it is hard to play catchup with Nvidia – first with GPUs and then with rackscale designs. But AMD did catch and then pass Intel, and there is no law of physics that says AMD cannot catch and beat Nvidia. Incumbents, and especially monopolistic ones, have a tendency to eventually choose a holding maneuver rather than a frontal assault. So, yes, it takes AMD until late 2026 to draw even with Nvidia “Oberon” rackscale systems with the “Helios” rackscale designs that it created in conjunction with Meta Platforms and Microsoft.
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So what? This is only the second skirmish in a very long war that will eventually descend into a price and price/performance war. One that AMD will be willing and able to win in GPUs as it has in CPUs. Nvidia will move higher up in the stack, selling support for its closed source CUDA-X stack and open source models. And eventually – as hard as this is to believe today – they will share this very lucrative market much as Intel and AMD and the Arm collective (comprised of homegrown CPUs from the hyperscalers and cloud builders) do today with CPUs. About a third each.<br>The point is this: If you were expecting for AMD to do better on the AI front than it did in the second quarter, well bucko, that’s your problem. AMD is doing better than its company’s top brass expected on both the CPU and the GPU fronts, and it is poised to more than double its GPU business next year thanks to Helios systems using its flagship “Altair” MI455X GPUs and its very powerful next generation “Verano” CPUs, a high I/O, mid-core count variant of the “Venice” sixth generation Epyc processors that will also be ramping as 2026 unfolds.<br>Chief executive officer Lisa Su laid the scenario all out in the call with Wall Street going over the Q2 financial results. The datacenter AI accelerator business, which will now include the Helio rack components that are sold to the ODMs and OEMs of the world so they can make systems on behalf of AMD’s MI455X customers, will grow in the second half of 2026 faster than it did in the first half, where it was no slouch, and the plan is for the datacenter AI business to accelerate growth even further in 2027.<br>To be more precise, Su said that the Epyc CPU business will grow by more than 80 percent in the second half of 2026 and by more than 70 percent in all of 2027 against what will be a pretty tough compare, and added that the overall datacenter business will more than double in 2027. She also said that AMD had enough wafer, substrate, interposer, and HBM capacity to not only meet these commitments, but had a little spare capacity on the upside so the company does not get caught flat-footed as it did with the sudden rise of agentic AI sandboxes based on fast CPUs this year. No worries, that demand spike just meant that all CPU makers could sell out, no matter what they had on the truck and at prices they could command.
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I think it is safe to say that AMD is going to gain server CPU share in 2026 and 2027 and will gain share of rackscale systems by definition in the same timeframe because it doesn’t have any right at the moment. So it is all upside with Helios. Unit shipments and average selling prices for both Epyc CPUs and Instinct GPUs are both on the rise, and that is what is driving this revenue boom for AMD, along with increasing NIC and DPU shipments, which are part of the Helios package.<br>As far as we can tell, AMD is keeping pace, more or less, with the total addressable market for the datacenter overall, which it outlined at its recent Advancing AI 2026 event in Silicon Valley and which we covered in detail here. I had to so some spreadsheet magic to fill in the gaps on the datacenter compute TAM for 2026 through 2029, but what AMD said this week matches with what I hunched out two weeks ago.<br>Now, for the datacenter AI accelerator market, AMD is growing faster than the TAM it did outline for those years as well as for the 2025 and the...