AMD (AMD) will report its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Tuesday, providing Wall Street with its best look yet at the health of the ongoing AI trade.
Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) reported their respective results last week, sparking wildly divergent reactions from traders: Many balked at Microsoft’s increased spending and more modest growth, but applauded Meta’s performance despite a massive jump in its own AI spending.
Despite consistent fears of an AI bubble and overspending, shares of AMD and rival Nvidia (NVDA) are up significantly over the last 12 months, with AMD climbing 114% and Nvidia rising 58%.
AMD, like Intel (INTC), is also contending with the global memory shortage, which could force PC makers to raise prices on laptops and desktops, impacting sales and hitting AMD’s consumer chip business.
AMD is expected to report Q4 earnings per share (EPS) of $1.32 on revenue of $9.6 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus estimates. That would mark an increase from the $1.09 and $7.7 billion the company saw in the same quarter last year.
Wall Street is anticipating data center revenue of $4.97 billion, up 29% year over year from the $3.86 billion AMD reported in Q4 2024. The company’s client business revenue is expected to top out at $2.9 billion. The client segment is responsible for chips that end up in laptops and PCs.
The chip designer’s gaming business is projected to see revenue of $855 million, a 52% year-over-year jump from the $563 million the segment saw in 2024.
AMD’s results come roughly a month after it showed off a variety of new products during CEO Lisa Su’s keynote at CES 2026 in Las Vegas.
That includes the company’s upcoming Helios rack-scale server, which Su said is the world’s best AI rack, a clear shot at Nvidia.
Helios is designed to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s own Vera Rubin-powered NVL72 rack-scale offering. Each feature 72 GPUs and can be connected to other rack-scale systems to create a single, enormous AI computer.
AMD also provided more information about its upcoming MI500 series of GPUs, which the company claims offer up to a 1,000x increase in AI performance versus its older MI300X chips.
Su has said she believes the AI data center market will be worth some $1 trillion by 2030, giving AMD plenty of incentive to ensure it has the kind of products necessary to woo potential customers away from Nvidia.
But like Nvidia, AMD is seeing increased competition from some of its own customers as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft continue to roll out more of their own customer chips in their data centers.
