AMD Lands Meta as Data Centre Chip Customer, Takes on Nvidia

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday stated it has gained Meta as a knowledge heart chip buyer, sending AMD shares up greater than 11 % because it cemented a few of its positive factors in opposition to Intel.

It additionally introduced a spread of recent chips geared toward taking up bigger rivals resembling Nvidia in supercomputing markets, in addition to smaller opponents, together with Ampere Computing within the cloud computing market.

After years of trailing the a lot bigger Intel out there for x86 processor chips, AMD has steadily gained market share since 2017, when a comeback plan spearheaded by Chief Executive Lisa Su put the corporate on a course to its current place of getting sooner chips than Intel’s.

AMD now has practically 1 / 4 of the marketplace for x86 chips, in line with Mercury Research.

After securing Meta, the corporate previously referred to as Facebook, as a buyer, AMD has offers in place with lots of Intel’s largest prospects. It additionally has offers with Alphabet’s Google Cloud, Amazon’s Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft’s Azure.

Christopher Rolland, a semiconductor analyst at Susquehanna International Group, stated in a notice to buyers that AMD seemed to be profitable part of Meta’s elevated spending because it ramps up plans to construct digital on-line worlds.

“Investors are now trying to identify the big hardware beneficiaries of this capex, and today’s announcement could suggest AMD is winning a healthy portion,” Rolland wrote.

AMD on Monday additionally introduced plans to tackle rivals past Intel. The firm introduced a chip known as the MI200, which is an “accelerator” designed to hurry up sure duties like machine studying and synthetic intelligence.

The new AMD chip is designed to tackle Nvidia’s A100 chip, which, together with different chips designed to hurry up synthetic intelligence, has helped make Nvidia essentially the most precious US-listed semiconductor firm.

AMD stated that Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will use the brand new chip in its “Frontier” supercomputing system.

AMD additionally took purpose at smaller rivals. The firm introduced a brand new central processor known as “Bergamo” that can ship within the first half of 2023. The chip can have 128 computing cores, that are helpful for cloud computing corporations that hire out their chips on a core-by-core foundation to outdoors prospects.

Ampere Computing, a startup based by former Intel executives, is pursuing an analogous high-core-count technique and this yr signed up Oracle’s cloud service as a buyer.

© Thomson Reuters 2021