A record quarter, carried by one segment
AMD reported third-quarter revenue of $13.4bn on Tuesday, up 45% year over year and above the high end of its own guidance. On a GAAP basis gross margin was 54%, operating income $2.8bn, net income $2.4bn and diluted earnings per share $1.46. On a non-GAAP basis gross margin was 56% and diluted earnings per share $2.09.
The growth came from one place. Data Center segment revenue was a record $8.5bn, up 97% year over year, which AMD attributes to demand for its EPYC server processors and to the launch of the Instinct MI450 Series GPUs. That single segment is now about 63% of the company’s revenue.
“We delivered a record quarter with revenue exceeding the high end of our guidance as Data Center segment sales nearly doubled year-over-year,” said Lisa Su, AMD’s chair and chief executive.
Gaming went the other way
Client and Gaming revenue was $3.7bn, down 8%. Inside it the two halves moved in opposite directions: client revenue rose 7% to $2.9bn on sales of Ryzen mobile processors, while gaming revenue fell 40% to $773m, which AMD puts down to lower semi-custom and graphics revenue. Embedded revenue was $1.1bn, up 29%, led by aerospace and defence, automotive, communications and industrial customers.
The guidance is the headline number
For the fourth quarter AMD expects revenue of approximately $17bn, plus or minus 3%, with non-GAAP gross margin of about 55%. The company says the midpoint represents year-over-year growth of approximately 66% and a sequential increase of approximately 27%.
That sequential step is roughly $3.6bn in a single quarter — more than four times the entire gaming business in the quarter just reported, and close to half of what the data centre segment earned in the three months to September. Chief financial officer Jean Hu said the outlook “reflects accelerating revenue and earnings growth, driven by strong demand across our Data Center portfolio”.
Who AMD says is using Helios
The release names customers, which is the part most directly about the AI market rather than about AMD’s books. Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are running models and workloads on the first AMD Helios rack-scale systems, built from Instinct MI450 Series GPUs and sixth-generation EPYC CPUs, according to the company. HPE said Vultr will deploy the first AMD Helios by HPE systems, and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking selected Instinct MI430X GPUs and sixth-generation EPYC processors for the LUMI-AI supercomputer.
AMD also released ROCm 10, introduced a reference architecture called Helion for rack-scale agentic systems, and announced agreements to acquire World Labs and the inference-silicon company Taalas. None of those carries a disclosed price in the results release.
What to watch
Su tied the fourth-quarter acceleration to scaling Helios and the “Venice” generation into production, so the number to check in February is whether the $17bn landed and how much of it came from Instinct rather than EPYC. AMD does not break out Instinct revenue separately, which means the segment line is currently the only public measure of how a stated near-doubling is actually split.
