The MI450 Waiting Game
AMD delivered its best quarter ever. Yet the market wants to know why to own it right now.
AMD just hit $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. Margins are expanding. Lisa Su reaffirmed the 35% revenue CAGR target. And yet, the stock sold off by ~15%.
Investors are telling us they don’t know why to own AMD right now.
The MI450 inflection doesn’t hit until Q4 2026, and investors won’t see those numbers until early 2027. That’s a long time to wait. Server CPU is strong, but is it enough? Client faces a softening TAM. China's revenue was helpful to the beat but might not be repeatable.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is describing an expanding inference datacenter portfolio, with recent announcements including Rubin CPX, Context Memory Storage, and Groq. What’s AMD’s counterpositioning?
Here’s my breakdown of the quarter. What the numbers say, what management said on the call, and what they didn’t say. Including:
MI450 timing: why Q4 2026 is perceived as the only 2026 quarter that matters, and the buy-side’s why now? problem
OpenAI: the leading indicator investors should watch and AMD should talk about
Inference strategy: AMD vs Nvidia’s portfolio
Server CPU: a bright spot. But 2026?
China: strip out $390M in MI308 sales and the beat looks different
Client and Embedded: where margins are heading in 2027
Let’s dig in.