AMD CFO Says Agentic AI Is Driving 'Tremendous' CPU Demand, Reaffirms $120B Market Opportunity

• The company expects the second-quarter CPU revenue to grow 70% year-over-year, and the data center CPU TAM is estimated at $120 billion by 2030.
• AMD expects the agentic AI segment to grow fastest in the CPU business.
• OpenAI and Meta as anchor customers, the company sees the forecast from those customers above its original plan for 2027.

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) were on track for record highs in premarket trading on Wednesday, riding a wave of announcements of agentic AI PCs from Nvidia and the company’s new Helios platform that made the rounds at Computex this week.

While much of Wall Street’s artificial intelligence (AI) narrative focuses on GPUs, AMD is making the case that CPUs could become the biggest beneficiaries of the next phase of AI. Speaking at the Bank of America Conference on Tuesday, Jean Hu, Chief Financial Officer at AMD, stated that the agentic AI is driving 'tremendous' CPU demand. 

"Agentic AI is not about answering questions anymore. It's about orchestration, it's about database access, and a lot of tool execution. And all of those require significant CPU performance," Hu said. "What we are seeing is very significant and incremental demand for our CPU platforms."

AMD expects second-quarter CPU revenue to grow more than 70% year-over-year, following the first quarter's more than 50% growth. 

In November last year, on its Financial Analyst Day, AMD outlined a $60 billion total addressable market (TAM) for CPUs by 2030, but in an earnings call after the first-quarter results, the company expects it to be more than $120 billion.

At the time of writing, AMD stock was up 2% premarket on Wednesday.

The Three CPU Segments And Why Agentic AI Is The Biggest

CFO Hu broke the CPU market into three buckets: traditional general-purpose compute, Head nodes for GPU clusters, and agentic AI racks. 

The traditional CPU market accounts for roughly $25 billion to $30 billion today, head nodes for GPU clusters — the CPUs that manage GPU communication, and agentic AI racks — dedicated CPU infrastructure handling the ‘millions of operations’ between inference tasks, post-processing, data retrieval, and feeding the next agentic step. 

This is the fastest-growing segment and, CFO Hu believes, will be the majority of the $120 billion market.

"Agentic AI server racks sit in between the traditional servers and the GPUs," Hu explained. "Those racks are handling all those different workloads to really make sure all the agentic agents work."

OpenAI And Meta Anchor AMD's GPU Ramp

On the GPU side, AMD confirmed that the MI450 is now sampling, with the Helios rack-scale system launching in the second half of 2026. 

"We already have a number of customers that have full Helios racks in their own data center running their full production workload," said Matthew Ramsay, Corporate Vice President, Financial Strategy & Investor Relations at AMD.

The company expects a "pretty significant jump in the fourth quarter revenue" from GPU sales.

OpenAI and Meta are the two anchor customers announced, with CFO Hu saying their forecast for 2027 is ‘actually above our original plan.’ 

AMD also expects ‘other mega, gigawatt customers’ to emerge, with engagements across hyperscalers, model companies, and AI-native firms.

What Retail Thinks Of AMD

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment surrounding the stock has improved to ‘bullish’ amid ‘low’ message volume in the past week. 

AMD stock has climbed over 133% year-to-date.

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