A hot potato: Rest in peace, dedicated consumer GPU manufacturers. Since Nvidia has long been an AI company with a passing interest in making prohibitively expensive consumer graphics cards, AMD’s boss has confirmed that Team Red now considers itself a “data center first” company. With the data center segment accounting for about 63% of AMD’s record revenue in the third quarter of 2026, it’s easy to see why CEOs are turning away from PC gaming and turning to money.
Su made her comments in an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi, in which she portrayed data centers as central to AMD’s identity and growth.
“We’re a data center-focused company, that’s our profile, and you know, people need more computing power to run all these applications,” Su said.
Perfectly illustrating the state of the current industry, AMD’s Instinct accelerators and Epyc server processors boosted the company’s third-quarter revenue to a record $13.4 billion, up 97% year over year. Meanwhile, gaming revenue plunged 40% year-over-year to $773 million, largely due to AI data centers gobbling up all the memory and other components, driving up graphics card prices.
Of course, this is all great news for Su. She said AMD’s data center business would grow 50% sequentially from the third quarter to the fourth quarter. “We want to double, more than double, the business next year,” she said.
Su also addressed the increasing demand for AI hardware from industry giants. “We are a technology company that has a lot of resources and the ability to expand our offerings and expand our ability to help our customers,” the CEO said. “I want to be the best partner for the largest computer users in the world.”
While there has been a lot of nervousness recently about massive spending on AI infrastructure, Su said the market can be “a little short-sighted” in assessing AI spending. Their argument is that companies should invest now to meet demand several years from now, even as investors question the immediate financial impact.
Su added that AMD always invests for the long term, which she said is about three to five years ahead. For gaming fans hoping for things to change soon, that doesn’t sound promising.
The competitor Nvidia has of course gone one step further and is putting “AI first”. In the last reported quarter (Q2 FY2027), $89.02 billion, or 92.5% of revenue, came from the data center business. Team Green no longer even reports gaming separately, instead lumping it into the broader edge computing category, which brought in $7.5 billion, or 7.5% of its total revenue.
