AMD

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is an American semiconductor company. It was founded in Silicon Valley on 1 May 1969 by Jerry Sanders, who had worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, together with seven colleagues. Its headquarters is in Santa Clara, California. It is incorporated under the law of the US state of Delaware, became a public company in 1972 and is now listed on the US NASDAQ market under the symbol 'AMD'. Lisa Su, who became chief executive (CEO) in October 2014, is chair and CEO as of October 2026.

AMD designs and sells chips such as CPUs (central processing units, which act as a computer's 'brain') and GPUs (graphics processing units, chips that do many calculations at once). For the 2025 financial year it had three business segments. 'Data Center' covers products such as EPYC server CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators (chips that speed up AI calculations); 'Client and Gaming' covers products such as Ryzen CPUs for PCs, Radeon graphics chips and custom chips for the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X and S games consoles. 'Embedded' covers chips built into other machines, such as cars and industrial equipment. AMD spun off its manufacturing into GlobalFoundries in 2009 and now relies on outside foundries (companies that make chips for others), such as TSMC, to produce its chips. It bought the graphics chip company ATI in 2006 and Xilinx in 2022.

AMD's main AI products are its Instinct GPUs for data centres. The company says the MI300 and MI350 series, among others, are designed for AI training and inference (the process in which a trained AI produces answers). Starting with the MI350 series in 2025, it set out a plan to release new Instinct products every year, and in 2026 it launched the MI400 series, which includes the MI455X, and Helios, which puts 72 MI455X chips into a single rack (a large frame that holds server equipment). It also develops ROCm, software that lets AI programs run on these chips. For PCs, it makes Ryzen AI processors that include an NPU (neural processing unit, a circuit just for AI calculations).