MoranElkarifNews: AMD beats on earnings but will take $1.5 billion hit to revenue from chip restrictions to China

Advanced Micro Devices reported first fiscal quarter earnings on Tuesday that topped expectations,and provided a strong forecast for current quarter revenue.

Shares of AMD rose in extended trading more than 4%.

Here’s how the chipmaker did versus LSEG expectations for the quarter ending March 29:

• Earnings per share: 96 cents adjusted vs. 94 cents expected
• Revenue: $7.44 billion vs. $7.13 billion expected

For the current quarter, AMD expects about $7.4 billion in sales with a gross margin of 43% versus Wall Street estimates for earnings of 86 cents adjusted on $7.25 billion in sales.

AMD’s forecast also included $800 million in costs that the company said it would incur because the U.S. limited the export of some of the company’s artificial-intelligence chips during the quarter.

The company reported net income of $709 million, or 44 cents per diluted share, versus net income of $123 million, or 7 cents per share, during the year-earlier period. Revenue grew 36% on an annual basis.

AMD is the second-place server central processing unit vendor, behind Intel, but its Epyc line of processors has been taking market share in recent years.

The company is also the closest competitor to Nvidia for “big GPUs,” or graphics processing units. Those are the kind of chips that are deployed in data centers by the thousands for building and deploying generative AI. It did $5 billion in AI GPU sales in the company’s fiscal 2024.

Both are reported in the company’s data center segment, which came in at $3.7 billion in sales, topping a StreetAccount estimate. Data center sales were up 57% on an annual basis, which the company attributed to demand for both Epic processors as well as its Instinct GPUs.

The company’s other segment, which is chips for consumer devices such as laptops and gaming PCs, rose 28% on an annual basis to $2.9 billion. AMD said that sales for its laptop and PC chips, which it calls client revenue, surged 68% year-over-year because of strong demand for chips the company recently released.

AMD’s embedded segment, which is mostly sales from the company’s 2022 acquisition of Xilinx, declined 3% on an annual basis to $823 million.

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