Note: We are on medical leave currently and will be publishing on a reduced schedule for a couple weeks.
AMD hosted their AI Innovation Day yesterday with a broad update of their product portfolio. The Street did not seem to like what AMD had to say, and we think that says a lot more about the markets than it does about AMD’s prospects.
The main event was the launch of their next data center AI Accelerator/GPU the Mi325. This looks like a perfectly reasonable product. It has all the bells and whistles we expect from these kinds of systems now with plenty of HBM memory and all the rest. AMD benchmarked the Mi325 against Nvidia’s H100 and the Mi325 comes out comfortably ahead. Of course, Nvidia started delivering Blackwell systems this week, but fear not AMD also provided an update for their M-series into 2026. Along with this, AMD announced updates to its software libraries and ROCm suite (AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s CUDA), with plenty of progress in terms of developers, libraries and supported models.
AMD also unveiled two new networking products – an IPU and a Smart NIC, based on products from the Pensando acquisition a few years back. AMD still has a long way to go in networking to compete with Nvidia, which is why AMD spent a lot of time talking about the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC). UEC provides a new version of the venerable Ethernet standard that addresses traditional Ethernet’s shortcomings around AI workloads. So while AMD’s products alone are fine, they do not need to take on Nvidia alone in this corner of the market.
None of this was exciting, just a highly-capable company, building out its roadmap and executing to plan. As we have said, AMD does not need to overtake Nvidia, they just have to be competitive enough to provide a credible alternative. If they can do that, they will have customers and their numbers should be fine.
That being said, AI is supposed to be more than fine. It should be Exciting. AI software is moving so quickly, investors are scouring the world looking for AI beneficiaries. The Bubble Must Eat. So when AMD comes along with ‘just’ good execution it seems to have left some investors hungry for more. We do not think AMD is doing anything horribly wrong here, to the contrary it is doing most things well. Semiconductors, especially at the scale of something like the Mi325, can just not move as quickly as software. That is a feature, not a bug. The Street (or some subset of it) may want more, but it takes time to design and produce new chips, then more time to design, verify and build new systems, and even more time to build software ecosystems. It took Nvidia a decade to get where it is in AI, the fact that AMD is even remotely competitive speaks to the company’s and it’s CEOs capabilities.
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