AMD wins Meta as a data centre customer

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced it has won Facebook’s rebranded company, Meta, as a data centre chip customer, causing an 11% rise in AMD’s total shares. The company also announced a range of new chips to challenge larger rivals such as Nvidia in supercomputing markets, as well as smaller competitors, including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.

Christopher Rolland, a semiconductor analyst at Susquehanna International Group, said that AMD “appeared to be winning a part of Meta's increased spending as it ramps up plans to build virtual online worlds.”

He added that "investors are now trying to identify the big hardware beneficiaries of this CapEx, and today’s announcement could suggest AMD is winning a healthy portion.” AMD has launched a chip called the MI200, an "accelerator" designed to speed up certain tasks like machine learning and artificial intelligence. The new AMD chip is designed to take on Nvidia's A100 chip, which, along with other chips designed to speed up artificial intelligence, has helped make Nvidia the most valuable UAS-listed semiconductor company.

AMD’s market share increases 

Following the company’s trial of Intel focusing on x86 processor chips, AMD has been gaining market share since 2017. As a result, AMD now has nearly a quarter of the market for x86 processor chips, according to Mecury Research.

After welcoming Meta as a customer, AMD has struck deals with many of Intel's largest customers. It also has deals with Alphabet Inc's Google Cloud, Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure.

AMD is also targeting its smaller rivals, announcing a new central processor called "Bergamo" due to be shipped in the first half of 2023. The chip will have 128 computing cores, useful for cloud computing companies that rent out their chips on a core-by-core basis to external customers.