Chipmaker AMD is “selectively investing with our lead partners” to ensure they can continue to secure data centre land and power, CEO Lisa Su suggested this week.
She made the comments after being grilled by analysts on what the firm is doing to ensure “anchor customers have the financing and the physical infrastructure to support… roughly 3GW or so of planned AMD deployments into 2027…”
Her comments came after rival Nvidia in August invested in data centre developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure – a privately held firm that works with utilities and investors to secure power, water, and other infrastructure for data centre locations.
AMD reported blockbuster earnings this week amid a sustained AI boom – posting $13.4 billion in Q3 revenue and net income of $2.4 billion. AMD’s data center segment revenue alone was a record $8.5 billion, up 97% year-over-year.
We've absolutely spent a significant amount of time with our customers planning what their needs are in terms of their deployments and their deployment schedules – and also with our supply chain partners to ensure that we have the wafers, the substrates, the advanced packaging, the memory, all of the other components that go along with it. It is true that demand is higher than supply." AMD CEO Lisa Su.
The sheer appetite for GPUs and associated hardware to power rampant demand for AI training and inference has seen buyers commit to colossal deals – even as AI data centre buildouts become increasingly politically toxic and energy access challenging.
Pressed by Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya on what visibility AMD has of the landscape here for its customers, Su said: “[For 2027] we know where the GPUs are going in terms of which data centers and which locations and all of that stuff.
“Going into 2028 and beyond… We have a very strong balance sheet. And from that standpoint, our goal is, first and foremost, we're investing in our growth to support that, and that means investing in R&D, investing in supply chain and capacity…
“Then we are selectively investing with our lead partners where we see it's helpful to have, for example, the data center infrastructure identified way in advance, and that's multiple years in advance. And I think that's the right thing to do to ensure that we are jointly ensuring that there's the right infrastructure as our new chips become available. But we are being selective and strategic in how we do that,” she added.
