AMD Posts Record $13.4 Billion Quarter, Eyes Intel's Crown

AMD booked $13.4 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 45 percent year over year, a company record set almost entirely by its data center business. The server segment grew 97 percent to $8.5 billion. Gaming, by contrast, cratered.

The number that matters most sits in the guidance. CFO Jean Hu said: "We expect revenue to be approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. The middle point of our guidance represents approximately 66% year-over-year revenue growth, primarily driven by the acceleration of our Data Center segment."

That midpoint, roughly 27 percent above this quarter's result, would place AMD ahead of Intel for the first time in the company's history. Intel's own fourth-quarter guidance, as reported by Tom's Hardware, brackets revenue between $15 billion and $16 billion. If both companies land where they expect, AMD finishes the year as the larger of the two by revenue.

What drove the record?

Two product families carried the quarter. AMD attributes the data center surge to demand for its EPYC line of enterprise server CPUs, alongside the launch of the Instinct MI450 series of data center GPUs. The pairing matters commercially: EPYC sells into the same AI-building customers who buy accelerators, and one product's install base tends to pull the other along.

The Client segment, which spans desktop Ryzen processors and laptop chips, posted $2.95 billion in revenue, up 7 percent year over year. Growth there came from Ryzen mobile chips, a modest gain next to the server business but a sign that the PC side did not shrink while the company chased AI demand.

Gaming is the exception in the report. The segment collapsed while everything around it grew, and the source figures show why the record headline needs an asterisk for that division. AMD's quarter is a story of one engine at full throttle and one sputtering.

Why the Intel comparison matters now

AMD has never outsold Intel in a quarter. The two companies have traded process leadership and server share for years, but revenue parity has stayed out of reach, largely because Intel's volumes across client PCs and data centers dwarfed AMD's for most of the past two decades.

Fourth quarter could change that arithmetic. AMD's guidance midpoint of $17 billion sits a full billion above the top of Intel's range. The gap rests on data center momentum holding through the quarter — a reasonable bet given the MI450 launch cycle, but guidance, not results.

A single quarter would not settle the rivalry. Intel retains a far larger manufacturing footprint and a foundry strategy AMD does not carry. But crossing Intel in revenue would mark the most concrete evidence yet that AMD's bet on EPYC and Instinct has redrawn the commercial map of the x86 market. The next report, in early 2027, tells us whether the crossover holds or was a one-quarter artifact.