AMD not ruling out making AI chips for Chinese customers
The Chinese market is very important to AMD, confirms the CEO.
During the recent earnings call, the AMD CEO not only confirmed the company’s plan to update their gaming GPU series but also emphasized the significance of their data-center product lineup aimed at accelerating AI workloads. The CEO reported an impressive over 7-fold increase in AI engagement in just one quarter, which has put considerable pressure on AMD to develop more powerful processors and overcome any obstacles to cater to their growing customer base.
AMD is currently gearing up for the launch of its Instinct MI300 GPU series in the fourth quarter, a critical opportunity for the company to meet the soaring demand and market requirements, which have become quite extreme due to the limited availability of NVIDIA AI chips. The scarcity has led to a skyrocketing of prices and difficulties in purchasing these GPUs without prior reservations.
China is a very important market for us, certainly across our portfolio, as we think about certainly the accelerator market. Our plan is to of course be fully compliant with U.S. Export controls, but we do believe there’s an opportunity to develop product for our customer set in China that is looking for AI solutions, and we’ll continue to work in that direction.
— Dr. Lisa Su, AMD CEO
Dr. Lisa Su acknowledges the importance of the Chinese market for AMD, despite being restricted by US export regulations. As a result, AMD is considering the possibility of developing products specifically compliant with the export rules, similar to NVIDIA’s approach with their datacenter chips.
AMD foresees substantial growth in the AI-capable hardware market in the coming years
NVIDIA has taken measures to comply with export regulations by limiting the GPU interconnect bandwidth to 400 GB/s for their A100 and H100 GPU series, resulting in new SKUs named A800 and H800. Intel has also made similar adjustments by introducing the Max 1450 to replace the canceled Data Center Max 1350 GPU (Ponte Vecchio) for different markets.
Clearly, there is substantial demand and financial opportunity in this sector, and all GPU manufacturers, including AMD, are eager to secure their share of the market. Ignoring this potential would be unwise for AMD.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
