Preceded by the AI boom, the House of Zen's rise isn't just Instinct - Lisa Su is riding high on some Epyc design chops too.
AMD’s market cap briefly passed $1 trillion on Monday, making the perpetual underdog one of a handful of chip designers to ever hold the distinction.
AMD is still the underdog here, at least relative to Nvidia, which holds the distinction of being the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of nearly $5.5 trillion.
AMD’s GPU team has spent the better part of three years changing the narrative around ROCm, helped by large-scale deployments of MI300- and MI350-series GPUs by the likes of Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Anthropic, and Meta, with lower prices and higher memory capacity being differentiators.
By mid-2026, AMD said it had not only closed the performance gap with Nvidia but was also on track to launch a new rack-scale compute platform in the third quarter that was bigger and faster than Nvidia’s existing Blackwell-based rack systems and Vera Rubin.
Compared to Nvidia’s own bleeding edge AI systems, AMD’s Helios rack boasts 50 percent more HBM4 and scale-out bandwidth and between 15 and 25 percent higher performance for AI training.
In February, Aaron Rakers at Wells Fargo Securities estimated that Instinct GPU sales accounted for between $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion out of $10.3 billion in revenues during the fourth quarter of 2025, about matching Epyc CPU revenues.
Alongside the launch of Helios in July, AMD announced Anthropic had agreed to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct accelerators to support AI training and inference.