EP 185: AMD Advancing AI, Intel Earnings and WFE Demand

**Ben Bajarin** (0:05)
Hello, everyone, welcome to another episode of The Circuit, I am Ben Bajarin.

**Jay Goldberg** (0:11)
Greetings programs, I'm Jay Goldberg.

**Ben Bajarin** (0:13)
Well, we had another action packed week across the industry. This week with a couple of moments, we had AMD's advancing AI day that we were boots on the ground with, we had Intel earnings, which then sent a whole slew of conversations to the AMD industry. So we're going to cover all of those topics and more and some of the little fingers that they extend into.
But let's start with AMD.
Obviously, Keynote was good for us, they had a couple of technical deep dives that I think are super interesting that I want to talk about. But let's talk broad strokes. Firstly, I want to make the point, and while we are all massive fans of Lisa Su and Have Been Forever, I think this was her best Keynote presentation-wise, like candor-wise, style-wise. Like, I thought it was really good. Like, she's been great in the past, but I think sometimes like I've been like, get a little bit more excited, Lisa, like really, like really feel like we're, we're having a friendly chat, you know, and kind of like, like the other. And I thought this time she did a great job. So, so presentation style, tone, candor, all that stuff, I thought this was her best, her best keynote.

**Jay Goldberg** (1:39)
I so just I want to set the record straight. Neither of us were actually wearing boots. We were on the ground. Nobody, nobody's wearing boots except for one camera grip guy I saw. He was wearing boots and a skirt. So it was, it was, it was 2026 It was a, it was a good event. Actually, no, I'm lying.
It was, it was a, it was a boring event, but in a good way, right? It, I think, I've said this before. The struggle with AMD is that for them, the best thing they can do is just execute really well and just do what they're supposed to do. And that's what they did. And it's, it's not exciting or flashy. I, this, I'll, I'll grant you, Lisa is, is getting very good at communicating in a more animated fashion.
She was more comfortable on stage than I've seen her before.

**Ben Bajarin** (2:41)
Absolutely.

**Jay Goldberg** (2:42)
She's, she's very good. Communication has never been, I think, her favorite thing to do, but she's, you know, I think she looked at it like a task, like a, like a thing, a skill. And she just honed that skill like she's honed every other skill imaginable. She's so capable.
I noticed something about the keynote and I was trying to think about this. They had, you know, as with every keynote, they have guests come on stage and talk, right? And it was, it was the co-founder of Anthropic and Satya and the hardware lead from OpenAI were both on stage. And she had actual conversations with them.
And they were kind of scripted, like I think that they knew what the questions were going to be. But she was actually conversing with them.

**Ben Bajarin** (3:28)
Yeah, right.

**Jay Goldberg** (3:29)
And it didn't feel canned the way that usually somebody comes up, oh, let's have this, you know, dignity from some other company come up and talk and they'll give a speech. And then the CEO will come back. And Lisa actually stood on stage with them and talked to these guys. And I think there was a little bit of off the cuff commentary she threw in.
That is hard to do. It's really, really hard to do. It's high stakes to do at a keynote. And she pulled it off pretty well.

**Ben Bajarin** (3:54)
Yeah. So let's talk about the product and positioning. There's two things that I caught that I think were interesting. And I mean, you're right in the sense that a lot of people just kind of, I mean, they already teased Helios. So Helios wasn't news. It was more technical details. What is this? We obviously believe they were going to do more in CPUs. That seemed logical. So I don't think there was anything people didn't expect. So it's sort of back to like, what's the story? Where are you positioning this? And how are you thinking about your differentiators? Obviously, the Anthropic deal is interesting. In fact, I went back to some of the commentary we had in like in August of 2025, we actually talked about AMD being a good fit for Anthropic where they could actually do some customization to Cloud on AMD hardware, which is exactly what's happening. So good on us for making a good guess, I guess.