EP 187: Inside the Future of Memory Summit & AMD’s "Boring" Bullishness

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

**Jay Goldberg** (0:10)
Greetings, agents. I'm Jay Goldberg.

**Ben Bajarin** (0:13)
All right. This week was good. There was a lot of earnings. We are not going to get to them all because there was also a super interesting conference that I was at, Future of Memory Summit that we think is worth digging into. But we do want to talk about AMD.
It was very interesting. There was a mixed reaction despite the fact that they had some pretty good numbers. I know that there's some timing questions which we'll talk about. But obviously, and again, coming off Advancing AI Day where they outlined a pretty bullish forecast as well as their own belief that they will outgrow the market in Accelerators, seems to be the execution part of this story, I think is kind of what I landed on afterwards. But what was your take, kind of high level?

**Jay Goldberg** (1:11)
I thought this is sort of very typical for what we've seen with AMD over the last few years, which is they have a sort of fundamentally, I don't want to say boring, they got mad at me when I said it last time. Boring, but in a good way. They have a fundamentally very straightforward story, which is, we're going to make some products, and we're going to execute to our roadmap, and we're just going to keep doing that quarter after quarter.
And that's what they did. And what a lot of, I think, the street has come to expect is like blowout earnings, big massive beats.
And that wasn't what they delivered. Like you said, they just had an event, what, two weeks ago, where they sort of gave all the good news. And this quarter came in, I mean, the numbers were good, like good quarter, good guidance, in terms of relative expectations that beat across all sort of metrics. But people weren't super excited. I think the stock was down the day after, and then it's up a little bit for the week. But it's very much in the category of just like, oh, just an execution quarter. And I think there's a class of investors who just want more excitement than that, and it wasn't exciting. It was good, which is like what AMD should be known for. And so I couldn't find fault with any other commentary. Some of the criticisms I saw afterwards struck me as a little esoteric data center. Whatever number people were expecting for data center numbers somehow wasn't good enough even though it was like, I think it doubled year on year. So there's a lot of little quibbling around it, but good numbers from a very solid company that just executing. That's the story, and I guess that wasn't exciting enough for people.

**Ben Bajarin** (3:01)
Yeah. I mean, and I think part of it too, but again, I don't know, again, if this is just the boring part, but so much strength in the business and CPU demand, even with ASPs rising as a part of that mix, as the new roadmap of CPUs can command some higher pricing.
But I don't know, maybe just people aren't as excited about CPUs, despite the significant growth of it and their outlook into that very big number into 2027 I mean, I get the accelerator base, but just the strength of CPUs alone, right? Which I just don't think a lot of people have fully grasped in their models. Like, they're pretty bullish on what's going on with CPUs going forward. And I don't know, like I said, maybe that's just too boring, but I just thought it was interesting that it kind of feels like it's either not exciting enough, or people just still aren't sure what's going on in the CPU demand.

**Jay Goldberg** (4:05)
Yeah, I heard that a little bit. I sort of took that in the context of they're making as many chips as TSMC can, they're selling as many chips as TSMC will make for them. I think that's the key thing there, along with everybody else, their capacity constraint. I haven't run the numbers yet, but I think they lost a little bit of share in the data center to Intel, which we talked about a few weeks ago.
Share is going to change this year, but the market is growing so fast that will blur the share. I think share is a less relevant argument right now. Just that the whole pie is growing so big.

**Ben Bajarin** (4:50)
Yeah.

**Jay Goldberg** (4:51)
So quickly.
So, I mean, what was it, three months ago? Which seems like an eon ago. Everybody's all excited about CPUs. And yeah, CPUs are still a big deal, but maybe they're not as exciting as they were three months ago, even though their numbers keep going up for everybody. So I think it's a little bit of sentiment versus where people's interest is right now.