AMD reports better-than-expected results but margin guidance only meets estimates (www.cnbc.com)

Advanced Micro Devices beat Wall Street in fiscal Q3, reporting adjusted EPS of $1.20 vs. $1.16 expected and revenue of $9.25B versus $8.74B consensus (up 36% year-over-year). Net income rose to $1.24B. AMD’s data-center business generated $4.34B (vs. $4.13B expected), client revenue was $2.75B and gaming surged to $1.30B. For Q4 the company guided to about $9.6B in revenue (roughly 25% growth and above consensus) but gave adjusted gross-margin guidance of 54.5% — exactly in line with Street expectations — a nuance that tempered the stock rally despite shares being up ~107% year-to-date. Separately, Amazon disclosed it sold all its AMD shares. The quarter is notable for AMD’s increasing push into AI infrastructure: in October it struck a major deal with OpenAI — potentially including a 10% stake — for deployment of AMD Instinct GPUs totaling 6 gigawatts over multiple years, beginning with an initial 1 GW rollout in H2 next year. That agreement, and AMD’s MI300-series/MI308 GPU roadmap, mark a meaningful challenge to Nvidia’s long-standing dominance in training and inference hardware. AMD also said its margin guidance excludes revenue from Instinct MI308 shipments to China, signaling potential upside if China shipments are cleared. For AI/ML practitioners and infrastructure planners, the OpenAI partnership and AMD’s stronger-than-expected data-center growth suggest growing viable alternatives to Nvidia for large-scale model training capacity, with implications for supply, pricing and software/hardware ecosystem competition.