AMD’s data center segment has become the company’s biggest business unit with year-on-year growth of 38 percent according to its Q4 2023 financial results.
In the results published on January 30, AMD revealed that the company’s data center business, which includes server CPUs and AI chips, had quarterly sales totalling $2.28 billion.
CEO Lisa Su said that the vendor's new MI300 GPU is "now tracking to be the fastest revenue ramp of any product in our history." Speaking on a call with analysts, Su said: “[AMD’s] data center GPU business accelerated significantly in the quarter with revenue exceeding our $400 million expectation, driven by a faster ramp for MI300X with AI customers.”
Launched in December 2023, the MI300-series has been designed to train and run large language models (LLMs). AMD claims the chips are the highest-performance accelerators in the world for generative AI.
In October, AMD said it expected it would see $2 billion in server GPU sales in 2024, a figure the company revised to $3.5bn as a result of its Q4 results. Su said both server CPU and data center GPU sales set quarterly and annual revenue sales records in 2023.
Despite the growth AMD has experienced in its data center segment, it still has some catching up to do on rival Nvidia, which currently dominates the AI chip market. Indeed, Wells Fargo Equity Research estimates that Nvidia currently has a 98 percent market share in data center GPUs. However, AMD and Intel are both making up ground, with Nvidia’s market share expected to drop to between 94-96 percent in 2024.