AMD's AI GPU business has only been running for a year, but it is already as large as its entire CPU operation

AMD announced its Instinct MI300 just last November, arguably the company's first truly competitive GPU for AI inference and training. It's really only been selling in large numbers for a few months. But already it's making about as much money as AMD's entire CPU operations.

These include CPUs for servers, CPUs for cloud computing, for desktop PCs, for laptops and much more. That's what AMD CEO Lisa Su said during the company's latest financial conference call yesterday (via Seeking Alpha).

Su was responding to a senior bean counter at Swiss bank UBS who wanted to find out exactly how much money AMD has made in recent months specifically from its emerging AI GPU operations.

The analyst assumed that AMD achieved sales of around $1.5 billion in September alone and speculated that the following months would have to be even higher. To which Su had this to say:

“We actually performed better in the data center GPU business compared to our original expectations. So you can imagine that the deal was actually more than $1.5 billion (as of September this year). I mean, we're actually seeing our AI GPU business now really approaching the scale of our CPU business.”

This is a significant achievement and undoubtedly explains why AMD's share price is around 2.5 times its mid-2022 level. Of course everything is relative. While AMD's booming AI GPU sales look great on their own, they pale in comparison to Nvidia's.

In the same investor call, another analyst pointed out that Nvidia would likely hit a staggering $50 billion to $60 billion in AI GPU sales in 2025, while AMD could reach $10 billion at best.

Still, anything specifically gaming-related feels like an awfully small beer for AMD these days, no matter how you slice it. Sales of the “gaming” business, which includes not only gaming graphics cards for PCs but also the AMD-developed APUs in the Xbox and PlayStation consoles, were just $462 million in the last quarter.

This represents just 6.8% of AMD's total revenue. And shrinks. Likewise, AMD's CPUs for desktop and laptop PCs generated nearly $2 billion in sales during the same period.

It makes you wonder how motivated AMD can be when it comes to GPUs for PCs when there is so much more money to be made elsewhere. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the AI GPU market will continue to boom. And graphics chips for PCs are a long-term core competency of AMD.

So here's hoping AMD puts all of its efforts into improving its gaming graphics. When it comes to AMD's next-gen cards, we'll find out soon enough, as Lisa Su confirms that RDNA 4, likely in the form of the Radeon RX 8800 XT, will arrive “early” in 2025.

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