Perpetual underdog AMD nips at Nvidia's heels as it joins the $1T club
Fueled by the AI boom, the House of Zen's rise isn't just Instinct - Lisa Su is riding high on some Epyc design chops too
On Monday, AMD briefly surpassed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, marking it as one of the few chip designers to achieve such a feat. Despite this achievement, AMD remains the underdog in comparison to Nvidia, which boasts the most valuable company title with a market cap nearing $5.5 trillion. Nevertheless, Nvidia has been overtaken by rival Intel, whose valuation currently stands at $640 billion.
AMD's success is largely attributed to the AI boom. Initially, AMD focused on traditional high-performance computing applications and national supercomputing projects; however, it shifted its focus to AI in 2023 with the launch of the Instinct MI300A GPU. Although on paper, AMD's product outperformed Nvidia's H100 and H200-series GPUs in terms of performance, memory, and bandwidth, it faced challenges due to poorly optimized software designed for Nvidia accelerators.
Amidst this, AMD's GPU team dedicated three years to enhancing ROCm, leveraging large-scale deployments by numerous companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Anthropic, and Meta. These deployments helped expose AMD's accelerators to the open-source community and emphasized its products' lower prices and higher memory capacity.
By mid-2026, AMD asserted that it had not only closed the performance gap with Nvidia but was also on track to launch a new rack-scale compute platform called Helios in the third quarter. Helios boasts 50 percent more HBM4, scale-out bandwidth, and between 15 to 25 percent higher performance compared to Nvidia's existing Blackwell-based rack systems and Vera Rubin. AMD claims Helios will deliver a 30 percent performance per dollar advantage over competitors, although validating this claim remains challenging.
AMD's valuation has surged in recent years, not only due to its GPUs but also its CPUs. In February, Aaron Rakers from Wells Fargo Securities estimated that Instinct GPU sales contributed $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion of the $10.3 billion in revenues during Q4 2025, matching Epyc CPU revenues. The rise of agentic AI workloads like OpenClaw and Claude Code has fueled demand for CPUs, which AMD competes with Intel, Arm, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and cloud providers.
AMD's Epyc processors have consistently offered high core counts per dollar and, in recent generations, higher performance per dollar than competitors, contributing to a 35 percent share in the desktop CPU market and 34.5 percent in the datacenter.
AMD's share in the datacenter rose to 46.4 percent when comparing only Epyc and Intel Xeon SP processors. Despite facing pressure from Nvidia's Vera and Arm's AGI CPUs, AMD's modular design supports a broader range of target applications. Its acquisition of Xilinx, while not a significant revenue driver, established AMD as the largest supplier of FPGAs and provided valuable IP, including NPUs crucial for Microsoft's Copilot+ certification.
Looking ahead, AMD is poised to benefit from the growing number and scale of Helios and MI45 accelerators, deployed by major companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, and Meta.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
