AMD surpassed Intel in data center revenue in the first quarter of 2026, surpassing one of the most remarkable thresholds in company history. The greater need for not only GPUs but also high-performance server processors in artificial intelligence infrastructures has changed the balance in x86 competition again. AMD’s EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators made the company’s data center business the main growth engine of the quarter.
AMD passed the historical threshold in data center revenue. AMD announced revenue of $10.253 billion in the first quarter of 2026. The company’s total revenue increased by 38 percent year-on-year. In the same period, gross profit margin was 53 percent, operating profit was 1.5 billion dollars, and net profit was 1.4 billion dollars. Diluted earnings per share were recorded as $0.84. In non-GAAP results, gross profit margin increased to 55 percent, net profit increased to $2.3 billion, and earnings per share increased to $1.37.
AMD CEO Lisa Su The real breaking point of the quarter occurred on the data center side. AMD’s Data Center segment revenue reached $5.8 billion, increasing 57 percent compared to the same period last year. This growth was driven by strong demand for EPYC server processors and an increase in AMD Instinct GPU shipments. Thus, AMD surpassed Intel in data center revenue for the first time. Intel’s Data Center and AI unit generated $5.1 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026 and grew by 22 percent on an annual basis.
This table shows that the competition between the two companies cannot be read only in terms of total revenue. Intel announced total revenue of 13.6 billion dollars in the same quarter and remained ahead of AMD in this item. However, data center and AI infrastructure have become one of the most critical areas for growth in the semiconductor market. AMD’s overtaking of Intel in this field created an important threshold in terms of showing the point at which the balance of power in the server processor market has reached.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said that the first quarter results were shaped by the increasing demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to Su, the data center is now the main driver of AMD’s revenue and profit growth. The company states that inference and agentic AI applications increase the demand not only for accelerators but also for high-performance CPUs that manage and orchestrate these workloads. Therefore, the artificial intelligence competition is not only on the GPU side.
In large-scale data centers, GPUs undertake intensive tasks on the model training and inference side, while CPUs play a critical role in the overall orchestration of the system, data flow, task distribution and workload management. As Agentic AI applications work with more complex task chains, the importance of server processors has increased again. In DIGITIMES’ analysis, it is emphasized that this transformation has brought the interest in x86 processors to the fore again.
AMD also reflected this demand change in its financial expectations. The company previously predicted that the server CPU market would grow approximately 18 percent annually over the next 3 to 5 years. In the new evaluation, it is stated that this market will grow at an annual rate of over 35 percent and exceed 120 billion dollars in 2030. This revision reveals that agentic AI-driven processor demand is no longer seen as a temporary move on AMD’s part, but as a more permanent market expansion.
The company’s second quarter expectations are in the same direction. AMD expects revenue of approximately $11.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026. This estimate has an upward or downward deviation of $300 million. AMD also expects server CPU revenue to grow more than 70 percent year-over-year in the second quarter. The company announced that it is working with supply chain partners to increase wafer and backend capacity to support this growth.
AMD’s large-scale artificial intelligence agreements also support the picture on the data center side. The company announced plans to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs with Meta. It was announced that the first 1 gigawatt section will work with a custom AMD Instinct MI450-based GPU, and Meta will also be one of the first customers of the 6th generation AMD EPYC processors codenamed “Venice” and “Verano”. These deployments are shaped around the AMD Helios rack-scale architecture.
On the Intel front, the data center business continues to grow, but AMD’s momentum is higher. Intel’s Data Center and AI unit grew by 22 percent to $5.1 billion. In the same quarter, the company announced that Intel Xeon 6 processors were used in Google’s C4 and N4 cloud instances, and Intel Xeon 6 was chosen as the host CPU in NVIDIA DGX Rubin NVL8 systems. Despite this, leadership in data center revenue passed to AMD as of the first quarter of 2026.
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