AMD’s $9.2B Juggernaut: Inside the Strategy Challenging Intel, Nvidia

The air in New York at AMD’s 2025 Analyst Day last Tuesday was electric — and being there on-site made it even clearer that the real story wasn’t the record-breaking numbers. It was the palpable shift in the industry narrative.

While the tech world remains fixated on Nvidia’s staggering valuation and Intel’s ongoing turnaround saga, AMD, under the steady hand of CEO Lisa Su, has been quietly executing a multi-year masterclass in strategy.

The results speak for themselves: a record revenue of $9.2 billion, soaring 36% year-over-year (YOY) and obliterating consensus estimates. It wasn’t just a good quarter; it was a dominant performance, with non-GAAP net income skyrocketing 152% sequentially to $2 billion.

AMD is no longer just the scrappy underdog; it’s a quiet giant steadily outmaneuvering rivals by capitalizing on their core weaknesses, like Intel’s market vulnerabilities and Nvidia’s growing list of self-inflicted problems.

Buzz in the Hall: Customers Feel Cheated

A fascinating undercurrent at the analyst event was the quiet chatter among attendees about customer frustration. There’s a growing sentiment among IT customers that they feel “cheated” by major OEMs that continue to default to non-AMD solutions.

For years, Intel-based servers and Nvidia-based AI platforms were the “safe” choice. Now, IT managers are realizing they are paying a premium for solutions that are often less economically viable and, critically, not power-efficient enough.

Recent candid remarks from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella validated this sentiment. He stated that Microsoft’s primary bottleneck to AI expansion is no longer a chip shortage, but rather a power shortage. Nadella revealed that Microsoft has a stockpile of advanced GPUs it cannot deploy because it lacks the data center “warm shells” with enough available electricity to plug them in.

This dynamic is where Nvidia’s “performance at all costs” mantra hits a wall of physical reality. As I’ve argued before, Nvidia’s proprietary reign invites disruption. If your most powerful GPUs are too power-hungry for your biggest customer to deploy, you have a massive market vulnerability. That reality has created a golden opening for a competitor focused on efficiency and real-world deployment, and AMD is walking right through it.