AMD Rides The HPC Tiger In The Datacente
The Next Platform, Monday, August 11th, 2025
Being in the high performance computing business, as AMD most definitely is, has its ups and downs. Choppiness of revenues and profits was a way of life for Cray and Silicon Graphics as well as for the HPC divisions of IBM, Dell, and Hewlett Packard as well.
But a trade war between the US and China has made the situation a bit more turbulent than we might have expected given this, which is evident in the datacenter business for AMD in its second quarter of 2025.
We were on holiday in northern Michigan with the family last week when AMD's numbers for Q2 came out, and we are going to be playing a little Vacation Ketchup this week.
Perhaps it is a good thing we were on vacation a week ago, given the news that just came out today that both AMD and Nvidia are working out a deal with the Trump administration to hand over 15 percent of their AI chip revenues to the US Treasury in exchange for being able to sell their respective and similarly crippled 'Antares' MI308 and 'Hopper' H20 GPU accelerators to Chinese customers.