AMD & Apple Earnings

What to make of AMD until MI450 is here? And a vintage Apple quarter, but what about AI?

So many important earnings calls lately. Let’s start at the front of the phonebook with the A’s.

First, AMD. Investors remain unimpressed with Instinct sales until MI450 ships, but that doesn’t mean AMD isn’t moving the ball forward. We’ll break that down, and what to watch for at AMD’s upcoming Financial Analyst Day.

Then Apple. A classic “traditional Apple” quarter, driven by the iPhone 17 launch. But… what about AI?

If you’re not sure how to think about AMD between now and the MI450 launch… keep reading.

AMD Q32025 - Instinct is gaining steam, even if it’s hard to see

From Bloomberg,

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. failed to impress investors with its revenue outlook, halting a blistering run-up in its shares this year and adding to the concerns over an AI-fueled bubble.

Investors betting on the AI boom had been piling money into AMD in particular following blockbuster agreements with OpenAI and Oracle Corp., both of which plan to use the company’s chips in their buildout of AI computing. Some had seen the deals as a sign that AMD might finally crack Nvidia’s dominance in the AI processor market, sending the shares soaring by more than 100% this year. The company’s market valuation has more than doubled to $409 billion since June.

But Tuesday’s outlook signals that AMD’s payoff may come slower than some had anticipated.

Investors wanted a clean GPU headline. Instead, the first line of the earnings release focused on CPUs.

“We delivered an outstanding quarter, with record revenue and profitability reflecting broad based demand for our high-performance EPYC and Ryzen processors and Instinct AI accelerators,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO

To be fair, client and server CPU revenue were exceptionally strong. But the messaging order still downplayed what could be the most consequential business in AMD’s history: Instinct GPUs!

Again, the ordering was backward on the earnings call too. From the top,

CEO Lisa Su: Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon to all those listening today. We delivered an outstanding quarter with record revenue and profitability, reflecting broad-based demand across our data center AI, server and PC businesses. Revenue grew 36% year-over-year to $9.2 billion. Net income rose 31%, and free cash flow more than tripled led by record EPYC, Ryzen and Instinct processor sales.

Stacy Rasgon poked on this:

Stacy Rasgon: For data center in the quarter, what grew more year-over-year on a dollar to percentage basis? The [CPU] servers or the GPUs?

CEO Lisa Su: Stacy, I think our commentary was data center grew nicely year-over-year in both of the areas, both for servers as well as data center AI.

Stacy Rasgon: Yes. But could you -- I mean, just directionally, did one -- which one grew more than the other? I’m not even asking for numbers, just directionally.

CFO Jean Hu: Directionally, they are similar, but server is a little bit better.

Given that GPU TAM is expanding far faster than CPU TAM, investors were looking for GPUs as the lede. Hmmm…

Some context: MI350 only started shipping in June, and is still ramping through 1H26. Lisa said as much to Stacy:

CEO Lisa Su: No. Look, Stacy, let me say it. So data center [up] sequentially double-digit percentage. Both server and data center AI are going to be up as well. And from the standpoint of where they are, I think we’re pleased with how both of them are performing.

Moreover, I think investors tend to overweight the near-term sales impact of MI350 family, yet underweight the impact it will have on AMD’s trajectory in the long run.

Let me explain.