AMD reported its third-quarter 2026 results on November 3, with revenue of $13.377 billion, up 45% year over year and 16% from the prior quarter, against market expectations of about $13.06 billion. On a non-GAAP basis, earnings per share came in at $2.09, above the roughly $1.94 analysts had expected; GAAP net income was $2.428 billion.
Fourth-quarter guidance is about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%, which at the midpoint implies year-over-year growth of roughly 66%. What the market cared about more was Lisa Su's outlook for next year, given on the earnings call:
"Based on our current visibility, we now expect revenue to grow more than 80% in 2027."
After the report, AMD shares rose about 7.5% in after-hours trading to around $520. That price only counts once regular trading confirms it.
MI450 starts to show up in revenue
The growth forecast rests mainly on AI accelerators. AMD said the MI455X began shipping in high volume in the third quarter, and that it recognized revenue on its Helios rack-scale systems for the first time. Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle have already brought the first racks online, and HPE, Dell, Lenovo and Supermicro are due to begin shipments in the fourth quarter.
Su's breakdown for 2027: server revenue doubles, data center CPUs roughly double, and data center AI grows "significantly more than double." In the fourth quarter there will also be a milestone, when AI revenue exceeds server CPU revenue in dollar terms for the first time.
The CPU side is not standing still either. Next-generation Venice began contributing revenue in the third quarter, and OEMs and ODMs have committed to more than 240 platforms, about 20% more than for the previous-generation Turin. OpenAI has also chosen Turin EPYC as the host CPU for its first custom accelerator platform.
A company's revenue mix is changing
Lining up a few points in time shows the speed of the shift more clearly than any single quarter's growth rate:
| Period | Data center share of total revenue |
|---|---|
| Q3 2025 | 47% |
| Q3 2026 | About 64% |
| Q4 2026 (rough estimate from guidance) | About 75% |
| 2027 (company expectation) | Over 80% |
The Q4 row is our own estimate, based on management's comment that data center revenue will grow about 50% sequentially: $8.546 billion times 1.5 is roughly $12.8 billion, divided by $17 billion.
The other side of the business is shrinking. Client and gaming combined brought in $3.722 billion in the third quarter, down 8% year over year; within that, client revenue still grew 7%, while gaming fell 40%. AMD expects this segment to decline more than 20% sequentially in the fourth quarter, and management also expects the PC market to shrink by a double-digit percentage in 2027. Five years ago, this was AMD's core business.
The numbers still missing
The biggest variable in the growth forecast is supply. Su acknowledged that "It is true that demand is higher than supply," and said the company is working with its supply chain to expand capacity for wafers, substrates, advanced packaging and memory, including DDR5.
Margins are also still an open question. Non-GAAP gross margin was 56% in the third quarter, and fourth-quarter guidance is about 55%. CFO Jean Hu said the AI business dilutes gross margin but that absolute gross profit grows substantially, and the company is not providing quarter-by-quarter gross margin guidance for 2027.
There is also no official figure for deployment scale. An analyst on the call mentioned a planned deployment of about 3GW in 2027; AMD did not confirm it, saying only that it is planning 2027 infrastructure together with customers. Whether the 80% growth materializes will first show up in the pace of Helios shipments in the fourth quarter.
Sources: AMD Investor Relations, CocoLoop, SEC Form 8-K, Investing.com, Benzinga. Financial figures follow AMD's announcement; market expectations and after-hours share price come from Investing.com, and the earnings-call quote comes from a third-party transcript.