AMD in the AI stack

The business and what the filings show

AMD sells Instinct GPUs for AI and EPYC CPUs for servers. Over its latest four quarters it reported $41.3B of revenue, +40%, at a 53% gross margin, well below Nvidia’s, which reflects both its smaller scale in accelerators and the mix of other businesses.

AMD’s most unusual move is in its filings: warrants for up to 160 million of its shares each to OpenAI and Meta, at a penny a share, vesting as they hit purchase milestones for Instinct GPUs and as AMD’s share price reaches set targets. That is a discount paid in stock, and it shows how hard it is to win share against an incumbent with Nvidia’s software ecosystem.

For AMD, the measure of success is data-center revenue growth and margin as those orders ship. Investors should count the value of the warrants as a cost of the revenue they help win, since existing shareholders bear it through dilution.

How AI shows up in the numbers

AMD’s AI exposure is its Instinct GPU business, reported inside its data-center segment alongside EPYC server CPUs. CPUs benefit from AI data centers too, since every server needs them, so the segment’s growth mixes the two; the warrants to OpenAI and Meta are the clearest sign of how much AMD is investing to win accelerator share.

For scale, AMD’s revenue over the latest four quarters equals 7% of the $566B the five largest buyers spent on capital projects over their latest four quarters. Their capex rose +81% on the year before, while AMD’s revenue grew +40%: slower than the spending, so it is capturing a smaller share of each new capex dollar, or more of its business sits outside the build-out.

How it talks about AI

In its latest earnings release, furnished to the SEC on August 4, 2026, AMD mentioned AI 26 times in 886 words of narrative text, about 29.3 mentions per 1,000 words. Of its 6 sentences about AI, 1 included a number: a revenue figure, a growth rate, a customer count or another measurable result. Across the 8 releases we read, back to October 29, 2024, AI mentions per 1,000 words went from 30.0 to 29.3.

Specific claims are easier to check against the numbers than general enthusiasm, which is why the share of AI sentences that carry a figure is worth watching alongside how often AI is mentioned. The sentences below are quoted from the release as published, after removing safe-harbor text and company boilerplate.

• “AMD Helios delivers leadership inference tokens per dollar and is being deployed by leading AI labs and cloud providers including Anthropic, Cirrascale, HUMAIN, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tensorwave, Vultr and others. ◦ Launched the AMD Instinct MI400 Series GPU family , including MI455X, bringing leadership c…”
• “More broadly, AI is driving a significant expansion in demand for compute across all of our markets, and our leadership portfolio and growing customer visibility position us exceptionally well to capture this expanding opportunity and deliver substantial revenue and earnings growth in the years ahead.”
• “AMD announced a broad portfolio of high-performance and AI computing solutions and strategic partnerships to accelerate AI deployments at scale: ◦ Launched the AMD Helios™ rackscale solution, the world’s most powerful AI server rack.”

Source: earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), August 4, 2026.

The trend in the numbers

Since the start of 2023, AMD’s largest quarter by revenue was Q2 2026 at $11.5B, and its highest gross margin was 54% in Q4 2025. The latest quarter set the revenue record for the period.

Quarter by quarter, AMD’s revenue grew +36% in Q3 2025, +34% in Q4 2025, +38% in Q1 2026, +50% in Q2 2026 on the same quarter a year earlier. Growth has been accelerating.

Gross margin in the latest quarter was 54%, against 40% a year earlier, so it is keeping more of each dollar as it grows. Operating margin moved from −2% to 17% over the same span. Over the latest four quarters it turned 24% of its revenue into operating cash flow and spent 4% of revenue on capital projects, against 3% a year earlier.

Segments that matter for AI

The parts of AMD’s reported results most tied to the AI build-out, from the segment and product disclosures in its 10-K and 10-Q filings.

Where it sits in the stack

AMD sits in the chips layer of the AI stack. It is paid by the AI clouds and servers and networking layers; its own spending flows to foundry & tools, memory.

Among the 7 companies in this layer on our map, it ranks number 5 by revenue and number 3 of 6 by revenue growth. Its gross margin of 53% compares with 66% for the layer as a whole, so it keeps less of each dollar than the layer average. The full layer analysis is on the chips page.

Latest four quarters for 10-Q filers; latest fiscal year for 20-F filers. Companies under $100 million of revenue are left out.

Against the 6 US-listed companies in its layer, AMD grew +40% over the latest year versus +52% for the layer combined, and converted 20% of revenue into free cash flow versus 35% for the layer. It is growing more slowly than its layer, so its share of the layer’s revenue is shrinking.

What has to go right, and what could go wrong

What has to go right. Instinct GPUs have to win enough production deployments at OpenAI, Meta and others to build a durable second source to Nvidia, at margins that improve with volume.

What could go wrong. If the warrant-backed orders don’t lead to wider adoption, AMD will have diluted shareholders for revenue that doesn’t last, and its data-center margins would stay well below the leader’s.

These describe the conditions the business depends on, as the filings show them. They are not a view on the stock.

Through the lens of Investing in AI

Rob May’s book offers six mental models for telling AI moats from traps. The one most useful for AMD’s layer is “AI changes markets and corporate strategy”: When creation gets cheap, choke points move. Like the internet shifting newspaper profits to discovery, AI pushes moats toward coordination and control points. The winners sit at the new choke point, not the best AI story.

The question it asks of any company is: What becomes scarce in this value chain as AI makes the work abundant? Applied to AMD, the filings on this page are the place to start: the margin trend shows whether it holds scarce value or passes it through, the customer and financing disclosures show who it depends on, and the commitments show what it has promised before the revenue arrives.

Customers and concentration

US companies must disclose any customer that accounts for 10% or more of revenue, and foreign filers usually describe their largest customers. Concentration matters because a company’s growth is only as durable as the handful of buyers behind it, and in the AI stack those buyers are often the same few companies.

• We have not found a customer-concentration statement in AMD’s latest filings that our reader can quote cleanly; see its filings on SEC EDGAR.

Financing links

Investments, guarantees, purchase commitments, warrants and power contracts between AMD and other companies, each quoted from the filing that discloses it. Numbers match the money-loop map.

• 19AMD → OpenAICustomer warrant

  Warrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.01

  “In October 2025 and February 2026, the Company issued warrants to OpenAI OpCo, LLC (OpenAI) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (Meta), each entitling the holder the right to purchase up to 160 million shares of the Company’s common stock at an exercise price of $0.01 per share (the OpenAI Warrant and the Meta Warrant, respectively).”

  AMD 10-Q for the period ended June 27, 2026, filed August 5, 2026

• 20AMD → MetaCustomer warrant

  Warrant for up to 160M AMD shares at $0.01

  “In October 2025 and February 2026, the Company issued warrants to OpenAI OpCo, LLC (OpenAI) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (Meta), each entitling the holder the right to purchase up to 160 million shares of the Company’s common stock at an exercise price of $0.01 per share (the OpenAI Warrant and the Meta Warrant, respectively).”

  AMD 10-Q for the period ended June 27, 2026, filed August 5, 2026

Commitments and backlog

• Backlog. AMD reports $222M of remaining performance obligations, less than a tenth of its revenue over the latest four quarters: contracted revenue not yet earned.
• Purchase commitments. $30.3B of unconditional purchase obligations as of June 27, 2026 (10-Q): what it has contracted to buy from its own suppliers.

What to watch

AMD’s next quarterly report will cover the quarter ending around September 26, 2026. Large companies must file a 10-Q within 40 days of a quarter’s end and a 10-K within 60 days of the fiscal year’s end, so the new figures should arrive by about November 25, 2026 at the latest. This page, the layer pages and the next quarterly report all update from that filing.

• Data-center segment revenue and operating income, where Instinct GPU growth shows up.
• Warrant vesting as OpenAI and Meta hit purchase milestones, which links dilution to delivered volume.
• Gross margin as Instinct volumes grow, the test of whether share gains come at an acceptable price.
• Its place in the next quarterly AI Stack Report, which updates every company on the map from the new filings.

Figures from AMD’s SEC filings, latest period ended June 27, 2026. Other companies: all company pages.