AMD

Has anyone done a deep dive on AMD's custom silicon business? I know they did the PS5 and Xbox chips but I'm curious whether there's a real pipeline for custom AI accelerators the way Nvidia and Broadcom are reportedly doing with the hyperscalers.

Does anyone have a good read on how AMD's EPYC server CPU business is holding up against Intel Xeon in the refresh cycle? Last I checked AMD was at roughly 33% server CPU market share but I haven't seen updated figures since Granite Rapids launched.

Lisa Su has been one of the best capital allocators in semiconductors over the past decade, turning AMD from a near-bankruptcy situation into a genuine Nvidia challenger. The MI350 and MI400 roadmap through 2026 shows they're not slowing down, and TSMC's 3nm node access keeps them on equal process footing with their competitors.

AMD completed its acquisition of Silo AI, Europe's largest private AI lab, for approximately $665 million in cash. The deal is aimed at accelerating enterprise AI software development and building out ROCm-compatible model optimization tools to close the software gap with Nvidia's CUDA platform.

One thing that doesn't get enough attention is AMD's embedded segment, which is still deeply in a downcycle. Xilinx FPGA revenue was down over 50% year-over-year at its worst point and the industrial and communications end markets haven't recovered. That segment used to contribute $1.3 billion per quarter and is now running at less than half that rate.

MI300X is genuinely eating into Nvidia's data center share faster than anyone expected. Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle have all disclosed meaningful MI300X deployments and AMD guided data center GPU revenue above $5 billion for 2024, which they ended up beating. The inference workload story is real and the price-per-performance gap versus H100 is hard to ignore.

AMD's gross margin trajectory is worth watching closely. They printed 53% non-GAAP gross margin last quarter, which is up meaningfully from the low-40s range just two years ago, but it's still well below Nvidia's 78%. The mix shift toward higher-margin data center GPU revenue should continue pushing that number up if MI300X volumes hold.

EPYC Turin's Zen 5 architecture is showing a 17% IPC improvement over Zen 4 and the 192-core configurations are making some absolutely absurd database and virtualization benchmark numbers. If enterprise IT refresh cycles pick up in 2025 AMD's server CPU revenue could see a meaningful step-up alongside the GPU narrative.

AMD's client CPU segment is getting squeezed from both sides — Intel is finally shipping competitive Lunar Lake chips for thin-and-light laptops and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is taking real market share in the premium Windows tier. Ryzen revenue was basically flat last quarter and I don't see a catalyst to break out.

The valuation math on AMD is really hard to justify right now. You're paying roughly 45x forward earnings for a company where the GPU business faces an existential software challenge and the CPU business has structurally lower margins than the data center GPU segment everyone is excited about. Nvidia trades at a premium for a reason.