Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) CEO Lisa Su outlined the company’s priorities for 2026, highlighted new large-scale AI infrastructure agreements, and addressed questions around product ramp timelines, supply constraints, and market demand during a conversation with Morgan Stanley semiconductor analyst Joseph Moore.
2026 outlook and financial targets
Su said AMD entered 2026 with “a lot of momentum” driven by demand for high-performance compute and an environment that rewards strong product cycles and deep customer relationships. She pointed to growth potential in the data center business and said AMD is launching its MI450 accelerator this year.
Meta partnership, semi-custom GPUs, and warrants
Su described a newly announced long-term strategic partnership with Meta as a deepening of an existing relationship in which Meta has been a major CPU customer and an early adopter of AMD’s MI300 and MI350 series accelerators. She said AMD and Meta see “an inflection point in AI infrastructure,” with increasing workload specificity across training, inference, and different model sizes.
Su said the agreement is a “6 GW long-term strategic partnership” that includes a semi-custom GPU designed for Meta, alongside AMD’s work with Meta on CPUs and other system components. She characterized the engagement as “vertically integrated,” starting from Meta’s workloads and using AMD’s architecture to tailor a solution intended to expand AMD’s footprint in Meta’s ecosystem over multiple generations.
Addressing investor questions about warrants tied to the Meta deal, Su said warrants are “a very special instrument” AMD uses only for “transformational partnerships,” noting that most customers do not receive them. She said the warrants were designed to be “very, very performance-based,” aligning incentives so that both companies benefit if Meta’s foundational models succeed and demand scales. Su also said AMD expects broader benefits from such partnerships, including acceleration of its technology and software ecosystem beyond a single customer.
When asked whether other MI450/MI455 customers would receive similar warrant structures, Su said she does not expect that, adding that relationships with Meta and OpenAI are “pretty special” as multi-generational partnerships.
MI450, rack-scale systems, and the Helios platform
Su said AMD has made progress with MI300 and MI350, particularly optimizing infrastructure for inference and improving the software experience for customers. She said the time needed for customers to optimize workloads on AMD has shrunk from “a number of months” in early MI300 deployments to “a short number of days,” citing improvements in tools and libraries and AMD’s use of AI in software ecosystem development.
Looking ahead, Su called MI450 a “huge step function” and tied the product strategy to AMD’s acquisition of ZT Systems, which she said supports AMD’s ability to deliver rack-scale solutions and reduce “time to workload” for customers. She also said the Helios rack is based on a standard developed jointly with Meta, reflecting AMD’s emphasis on open ecosystem approaches.
Moore raised concerns about the complexity of rack-scale deployments and whether AMD can meet timelines. Su acknowledged these are “very complex systems,” but said AMD has done planning and risk mitigation, including validating rack-scale infrastructure before final silicon. She said AMD designed Helios with prior ecosystem issues in mind and emphasized that running workloads on systems is the key current focus. Su reiterated AMD’s previously discussed ramp profile: second-half weighted, with “a little bit in Q3” and a sharper ramp into Q4.
In response to a question about packaging capacity, Su said AMD “definitely” has enough CoWoS capacity to ship rack-scale solutions in volume in the second half of the year, adding that AMD has capacity, technology, customer relationships, and that data center providers have allocated space, with execution as the main requirement.
Networking roadmap and open standards
Su said networking is “very, very important” to unlocking rack-scale system performance, including both scale-up and scale-out. She cited work stemming from AMD’s Pensando acquisition, said AMD has its own scale-up NIC, and noted collaboration with switching partners. Su emphasized open standards and customer choice, highlighting UALink as an AI-optimized network option while also supporting “UALink over Ethernet” for customers that prefer Ethernet compatibility.
Demand, supply tightness, China, and competition
On demand sustainability, Su said AMD remains confident in the AI infrastructure opportunity because it is “solving real-world problems,” and she described AI infrastructure spending as tied to “productivity and intelligence.” She said AMD is seeing “significant new enterprise use cases” and argued deployments remain in “very early innings,” with current capex plans aimed at 2026, 2027, and beyond.
Su also emphasized that AI buildouts are not only about GPUs, saying the broader compute infrastructure required for “agents” increases overall compute needs. She said CPU demand has exceeded her expectations and suggested the compute market may be larger than AMD’s earlier forecasts. On supply, she said there is CPU supply tightness because market sizing has grown faster than expected, but added AMD is positioned to meet a large percentage of demand while working with supply chain partners to expand capacity through 2026 and 2027.
Discussing AMD’s CPU roadmap, Su said the company feels “really good” about its Venice generation, noting it was among the first products on TSMC’s 2-nanometer process using AMD’s chiplet architecture and is on track to ramp in the second half of the year. She added that customer interest appears strong, with large customers wanting Venice “the moment it comes out.” On ARM-based data center competition, Su said ARM has long been part of the ecosystem, typically on the lower-performance side, and framed the market as choosing the right processor for the workload based on performance per watt, performance per dollar, and total cost of ownership.
On memory, Su said AMD plans years ahead with vendors for MI450 and HBM4 needs and feels good about its HBM positioning. However, she said broader memory price dynamics are raising system prices, and while enterprise data center demand appears durable, AMD is watching potential PC market impacts, expecting the second half could be more muted in parts of the market due to volatile memory prices.
On China, Su said it remains an important market for AMD, with broad CPU customers, but GPU shipments are “complicated.” She said AMD shipped some MI308 units in the most recent reported quarter and discussed approximately $100 million this quarter. She said AMD is applying for licenses for the next-generation MI325 chips and that approvals are difficult to predict, so AMD is not forecasting additional China GPU revenue. Asked about Chinese competition, Su said it was “always going to be fierce,” while maintaining that U.S. technology roadmaps remain strong and that AMD wants to participate globally while working within government frameworks.
About Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD)
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ: AMD) is a global semiconductor company that designs and sells microprocessors, graphics processors, chipsets and adaptive computing solutions for a broad set of markets. The company’s product portfolio includes consumer and commercial CPUs under the Ryzen and Threadripper brands, data center processors under the EPYC brand, and Radeon graphics processing units for gaming and professional visualization. AMD also offers semi-custom system-on-chip (SoC) products for gaming consoles and other specialized applications, and provides supporting software and platform technologies for OEMs, cloud service providers and end users.
Founded in 1969, AMD has evolved from a supplier of logic chips into a diversified, fabless semiconductor designer.
See Also
- Five stocks we like better than Advanced Micro Devices
- New Copper-Rich “Kraken” Zone Discovered
- 3 Signs You May Want to Switch Financial Advisors
- Trade this between 9:30 and 10:45 am EST
- Silver’s squeeze is tightening – opportunity forming
- Trump’s NEW Executive Order – BIG Changes Coming to Retirement Accounts
