AMD $AMD on Wednesday reported first-quarter revenue of $10.25 billion, a 38% jump versus the $7.44 billion AMD recorded in the same quarter last year, propelled by surging demand for AI infrastructure that pushed its data center unit to new heights. Profit for the quarter reached $1.38 billion, translating to 84 cents per diluted share; in the year-earlier period, AMD had earned $709 million, or 44 cents per diluted share.
AMD stock surged about 16% before the opening bell Wednesday, lifting the broader chip sector with it: Intel $INTC climbed 6%, Arm Holdings jumped 11%, and Qualcomm $QCOM edged up about 4%.
Stripping out certain items, adjusted earnings per diluted share came to $1.37, clearing the $1.29 consensus analyst estimate tracked by CNBC. Wall Street had penciled in $9.89 billion in sales, making the top-line figure a beat as well, per CNBC.
The data center segment stood out above all others, generating $5.78 billion in revenue — a 57% increase from the prior year — on the back of strong orders for EPYC server processors and ongoing Instinct GPU shipments, the company said. The client and gaming segment brought in $3.61 billion, up 23%, while the embedded segment contributed $873 million, up 6%.
CEO Lisa Su, in a written statement, described the quarter as outstanding and attributed the performance to rapidly intensifying AI infrastructure demand. Su said the data center unit has become the central engine of the company's revenue and profit expansion, adding: "We expect server growth to accelerate meaningfully as we scale supply to meet demand."
Looking to the current quarter, AMD guided for revenue of roughly $11.2 billion, plus or minus $300 million, which would represent approximately 46% growth year over year and came in well ahead of the $10.52 billion analysts had forecast, per CNBC.
AMD highlighted building traction around its Instinct MI450 accelerator and Helios rack-scale AI system; Su indicated in her prepared remarks that the Helios platform is on track to reach customers before year-end. Under a multiyear agreement, Meta $META has committed to installing up to 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct GPUs across its AI data centers, with an initial one-gigawatt deployment built around a custom version of the MI450 chip, AMD said. Meta will also be a lead customer for AMD's upcoming sixth-generation EPYC processors.
Free cash flow reached $2.57 billion in the quarter, up from $727 million a year ago. AMD held $12.35 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of the quarter.
Its outlook for the server CPU market has also grown more bullish: AMD lifted its annual growth projection for that segment to more than 35% through 2030, nearly double the 18% rate it had previously anticipated, according to Reuters.. Growing adoption of agentic AI and real-world inference workloads, AMD argued, is pulling enterprise compute spending toward high-performance CPUs in addition to the GPUs that have historically dominated AI buildouts.