AMD showcases its latest semiconductor designed for artificial intelligence usage. AMD CEO Lisa Su tells Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi how these new plans are going to help shape the future of the company and the greater tech landscape.
Video Transcript
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Major news in the battle for super chip dominance. AMD has revealed its most advanced GPU for artificial intelligence. It will start shipping to some customers later this year. Joining me now is AMD present chairman and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Lisa, always great to get some time with you. Big day for your company.
I was going over the presentation. Maybe you could explain to the average investor out there what exactly did you unveil today and how important is it to the future of your company?
LISA SU: Absolutely. Brian, wonderful to see you as always. Thank you for having us on board. It was a big day for AMD. We unveiled a number of new products and a number of customers in our data center and AI efforts. On the data center side, we talked about, you know, new cloud capabilities with, you know, Amazon and Meta, as well as, you know, Citadel and a number of other customers.
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And on AI, you know, everybody's talking about AI. We've been working in the AI field for many, many years. And, you know, right now this is the moment. You know, AI is like the defining megatrend in technology. And we just talked about our very new chip, MI300, which is really aimed at large language model, you know, for AI. So that's the big news of the day.
BRIAN SOZZI: And, Lisa, I always love the names. I've told you before, I love the names that you put on some of these products. This sounds like a chip I need even though I'm maybe not so sure what I'm going to do with it in my house. But nonetheless, what is the demand look like for some of these products? And when will you start shipping them?
LISA SU: Well, think about it this way, Brian, you know, everyone has sort of captured this whole idea of ChatGPT and generative AI and copilot functions using AI to help us in our businesses and our personal lives, making us more productive and more capable. And the underlying technology for that is GPUs. And GPUs are actually really, really hard to build. There's an incredible amount of technology on here.
We're talking about, you know, the most complex chip we've ever built. 153 billion transistors. And the whole purpose is to make AI much, much more accessible. So everybody who wants to use AI needs more GPUs. And we have a GPU that is incredibly powerful, very, very efficient, and we believe will be a significant winner in the AI market.
BRIAN SOZZI: What is the price on something like this?
LISA SU: Well, you know, it's not about the price of the GPU, frankly. It's about how many users we enable. But look, we're excited. We look at the data center. I mean, this is an incredible market. So if you think about just AI chips in the data center, we think this year it's about $30 billion market. We think over the next three or four years, Brian, it's going to grow over 50% every year. So it's going to be like $150 billion market.
And it plays into our strength. It plays into our sweet spot. Everything that we've been doing, you know, in the data center and really putting together our CPUs and our networking capability and our GPU capability, is really to help our customers deliver these incredible services to the public.
BRIAN SOZZI: Let's look into next year, Lisa. Can you make enough of these chips to satisfy what looks to be just blowout demand for all things generative AI.
LISA SU: We are very excited Brian about what we see from our customers. Our customers are actually, you know, really, excited about ramping and ramping quickly. And so yes, the answer to your question, you know, we have a tremendous supply chain. We've built out a lot of capabilities with all of our partners. And so the technology is ready. We're building out the software that you need, as well as the supply chain.
BRIAN SOZZI: You know us here at Yahoo Finance, we very much like our numbers. And one of your largest competitors, I'll just call it, let's just say is Nvidia. They came out a couple of weeks ago and reset expectations financially for how much that company will earn because some of these chips. Do you think the Street has to reset its expectations on how much money your company will make over the next 24 months?
LISA SU: Well, Brian, I think the most important thing is to realize that the demand for AI is definitely there. And there are very, very few players that have this technology. you know, we view this market as secular growth. We love our positioning. We think that what we're doing with customers and the ecosystem is great. And so I look forward to, you know, really seeing that translate into growth for the company as we go through the next number of quarters as well as years.
BRIAN SOZZI: And what in terms of sustainability, Lisa, how much more market share do you have to grab in the data center industry?
LISA SU: Well, I think, Brian, although we've made tremendous progress-- I mean, if you think about where our epic servers are deployed today, we've made tremendous progress over the last three or four years. We had some of our largest partners on stage with us today to talk about how they're using our processors throughout their data centers for their most important mission critical workloads.
You know, Meta was talking about Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. You know, Amazon was talking about their EC2 instances which are their most important most popular instances. So we've made tremendous progress. But I can tell you there's a lot more that we can do.
And I view this as an opportunity not just to be a CPU player, but really to be an overall data center system provider. And that's where the GPUs are really exciting. Our networking assets are really exciting. And really this whole notion of deep partnership with the ecosystem is what we're all about.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yesterday, I was at Salesforce's AI day in New York City. And I asked CEO Marc Benioff. Marc, are you concerned about what this AI can do in terms of just societal changes. I'll put that question to you. Are you concerned about how powerful this technology is? And then do we need some form of global regulatory framework?
LISA SU: Brian, I do believe that we have to practice responsible AI. And I think all of us in the technology industry, you have to do that. I think there's a lot of good conversation and good dialogue around what that means. There will be some regulation. There should be some regulation. But I don't think we should forget that the power of the technology is so great that we need to really embrace it and take advantage of it while also practicing responsible AI.
BRIAN SOZZI: You know, I've followed your career for some time and you've had a lot of key moments. One of them to me being really reinventing AMD and really bringing it to where it is today on the cusp of this major news in generative AI and various other AI applications. Have you taken a step back and thought about, is this a career defining moment for you as a leader, as you roll out some technology that might change civilization?
LISA SU: Well, Brian, the way I was thinking about this is, you know, the technology world is all about seeing into the future, like, we have to decide, you know, 3 to 5 years in advance, like what do we want to build? And why do we want to build it? And why does the world need it.
And so today is a very special day. I have to say, it is one of those moments where our strategy that we've been working on for the last three or four years is really coming together. We love all the work that we're doing in the data center today, but AI is just such a transformative trend. And again, it's such a hard technology to build. But once you build it, it has such wide-lasting implications.
So yeah, it's a very special day today. And, you know, I love talking about our products. I love talking about what we can do for the world. And it's a fun place to be.
BRIAN SOZZI: Well, we have very much enjoyed following your journey and the transformation. I know you're very busy. We'll let you go. A big day for AMD. AMD President, Chairman, and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, always great to see you. We'll talk to you soon.
LISA SU: Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be here.