AMD reported first-quarter earnings on May 5: EPS of $1.37 against $1.29 expected, revenue of $10.25 billion against $9.89 billion expected, and Q2 guidance of roughly $11.2 billion — a beat on every line. Shares ripped about 20% in premarket trading on May 6. CEO Lisa Su told investors that 'Data Center now is the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth' and credited inferencing and agentic AI workloads with pulling demand for high-performance CPUs as well as accelerators.
The detail that matters: AMD is no longer pitching itself only as the discount alternative to NVIDIA's accelerators. Su's framing — that AI inferencing pulls CPU demand back into the data center — reframes EPYC as an AI revenue line, not a stagnant server franchise. That story, if it holds for another quarter, justifies a re-rating of AMD's multiple closer to NVIDIA's.
The earnings land in a memory-chip-constrained market that Samsung and SK Hynix have warned could persist into 2027, with Meta and Microsoft already calling out rising HBM costs in their own earnings calls. AMD's MI355X and MI400 roadmap parts depend on HBM3e and successor stacks. Beating on revenue while everyone is fighting for the same memory supply is a meaningful proof point.
A note for learners: AI infrastructure investing is no longer a single-stock thesis on NVIDIA. The supply chain — TSMC, ASML, SK Hynix, Broadcom, Arista, AMD — is increasingly capacity-constrained, and the earnings beats are spreading. If you want to understand where the AI buildout is actually consuming dollars, the chip earnings calls have become the most concrete map.