What AMD is up to now

New 09-28: agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2B in stock; Li becomes chief scientist. With Nvidia, lobbying to keep China chip limits out of the defense bill (Politico, 09-29). New 09-22 (cold rotation): CROSSED $1 TRILLION, RIDING META'S COATTAILS. AMD stock surged 10% on 09-21 to a record intraday high of $615.52, crossing a $1 trillion market cap for the first time -- the fourth US chipmaker to do so after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron -- with Intel (+13%) and Arm (+15%) also rallying. The driver was early-adoption data for Meta's new consumer AI agent "Muse" (264,000 US downloads in a single day, 448,000 daily active users by day 10), which market desks framed explicitly as a CPU-intensive-workload thesis distinct from the GPU-centred Nvidia financing loop this map otherwise tracks -- relevant evidence against demand softening broadly, but a different mechanism, not a restatement of the same data point. AMD remains well behind Nvidia's ~$5.4T market cap. New 08-29: two developments while the thread was quiet. At Hot Chips on 08-24 AMD disclosed hard MI455X and Helios specs past June's roadmap slide -- a 2.9-exaflop, 72-GPU rack, 31TB of HBM4, a single MI455X at 432GB and 40.26 petaflops peak MXFP4 -- with hyperscaler shipments still undated. Two days later Anthropic, a month after its up-to-2GW MI450 commitment to AMD, agreed to spend $45bn over six years on Nvidia Vera Rubin capacity from Nscale -- read as a hedge against exclusivity rather than a reversal, and the second named AMD marquee customer to visibly diversify. Standing picture below holds. New 08-13→08-14: AMD raised its largest-ever dollar bond sale, up to $5B across four tranches (3- to 10-year maturities, led by Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo) — officially "for general corporate expenses, which may include the repayment of debt" ($875M maturing next month), but Reuters/Yahoo Finance both framed it against AMD's own AI-chip agreements with Anthropic and Microsoft, including the $5B Anthropic equity stake this map's amd thread already tracks. This is a new layer for the ai- buildout-debt-risk story: borrowing at this scale has so far happened at the neocloud/data-center layer (CoreWeave, Lambda); this is the first time a chipmaker itself has raised public debt explicitly framed around funding an AI-lab equity stake. Priced 08-14 at a final $4.75B, the longest tranche tightening about a quarter-point from initial talk to +0.9 points over Treasuries, with AMD shares rising 5.6% on the print — confirmation the AI/Anthropic-stake framing held through final terms, though AMD itself never made that link explicit in official documentation. Standing picture (unchanged since 08-07): Q2 2026 revenue $11.536B (record, +50% YoY), Data Center $6.718B (+107% YoY), Q3 guide ~$13B — a clean double beat, shares still fell ~8-9% after-hours on stretched valuation. The Anthropic MI450/Helios partnership (up to 2GW) reaffirmed, first gigawatt now slated H1 2027. Acquired Taalas (Toronto), which hardwires specific AI models directly into silicon — HC1 chip encodes Llama 3.1 8B across 53B transistors at ~17,000 tokens/sec/user, ~200W. Musk said SpaceX/xAI are now "exclusive to Nvidia" for future AI infrastructure, read as closing off a future AMD customer, though he didn't name AMD directly. Posture classified `expanding` off the OpenAI 6GW deal, the Anthropic partnership and Oracle's 50,000-GPU Q3 rollout.

as of 2026-09-29