AMD's data center revenue hits $6.7B, doubling in a year as gaming plunges 31%

AMD just delivered a split-screen earnings report that tells you everything about where the chip industry’s priorities now lie. The company’s data center revenue hit $6.7 billion in Q2, a 107 percent jump from the $3.2 billion it posted a year ago and up from $5.8 billion last quarter. CEO Lisa Su isn’t tapping the brakes either — on Tuesday’s earnings call she projected the segment will more than double again by 2027. CFO Jean Hu noted data center now represents 58 percent of total company revenue, which reached a record $11.5 billion overall.

Meanwhile, the gaming division is getting hammered. Revenue there fell 31 percent year-over-year to $779 million. Su pointed to a specific culprit: “higher industry-wide component costs contributed to higher graphics card prices and weighed on overall demand.” That’s a polite way of saying that when GPUs get expensive, gamers pull back — and AMD’s semi-custom chip business for consoles like the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 isn’t immune to broader hardware slowdowns either.

The contrast is stark. A business built on PC gaming and console silicon is shrinking, while the one selling Epyc server CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators is carrying the entire company. Client revenue — that’s Ryzen processors for PCs — did grow 23 percent, suggesting the traditional compute market has some life left. But make no mistake: AI infrastructure spending is now the gravitational center of AMD’s financial story.

What’s less clear from the numbers is how much of that data center growth is Epyc versus Instinct, and whether AMD is actually gaining ground on Nvidia in AI training workloads or mostly catching the overflow demand. Su’s 2027 doubling forecast implies confidence in a multi-year buildout, but the hyperscalers funding this boom have a history of sudden capex pullbacks. For now, though, the math works: AI demand is more than compensating for a gaming slump that shows no sign of reversing.