AMD announced new products, acquisitions and partnerships in 2025 as it worked to boost AI performance across platforms ranging from desktops and mobile devices to data centers and supercomputers.
2025 was a pivotal year for AMD, with product launches, market moves, and security warnings among the highlights.
Additions to AMD’s product portfolio were featured in our two most-read articles. The Pensando Pollara AI NIC captured reader interest as it’s the first NIC that complies with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium’s 1.0 specification. AMD’s Ultra Ethernet-ready network card is designed for massive environments with thousands of AI processors. Targeting a very different part of the AI spectrum are AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, which are designed for high-end AI desktops and represent a challenge to Intel’s dominance in workstations.
Partnerships also made waves in the industry. As AMD works to expand its influence, it teamed with the U.S. Department of Energy to build two more supercomputers, struck a 6-gigawatt deal with OpenAI to supply chips, and announced plans to combine IBM’s quantum computers with AMD’s CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs in a blend of quantum and classical computing architectures.
These events and more make up our top AMD stories of 2025:
1. AMD rolls out first Ultra Ethernet-compliant NIC
Our most-read story about AMD reports on a first for the semiconductor company: AMD’s Pensando Pollara 400GbE network interface card is the industry’s first Ultra Ethernet-compliant NIC. (The UEC was launched in 2023 under the Linux Foundation with the goal of increasing the scale and reliability of Ethernet networks.) Designed for massive scale-out environments containing thousands of AI processors, Pollara enables GPU-to-GPU communication with intelligent routing technologies to reduce latency, making it very similar to Nvidia’s NVLink c2c. AMD revealed the new Ultra Ethernet-based networking card in June at its Advancing AI event.
2. AMD launches new Ryzen Threadripper CPUs to challenge Intel’s workstation dominance
Marking an aggressive push into the professional workstation and high-end desktop segments, AMD launched new HPC processors at Computex 2025 in May. The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9000 WX-Series and Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series are built to handle tough workloads such as VFX rendering, scientific simulation, CAD, and AI development for enterprise-grade workstations in industries such as engineering, healthcare, defense, and AI development. “AMD is positioning itself as a serious competitor in high-end enterprise environments by offering scalable performance, platform stability, and enterprise-grade manageability through AMD Pro Technologies,” said Manish Rawat, semiconductor analyst at TechInsights.
3. AMD targets hosting providers with affordable EPYC 4005 processors
AMD launched new data center processors that target hosted IT service providers. Announced in May, the EPYC 4005 series is built with enterprise-class features and support for modern infrastructure technologies at an affordable price, the company said. “The EPYC 4005 is a single socket platform and is thus designed with a ‘scale out’ strategy in mind, appropriate for small and medium enterprise requirements. The AM5 socket further helps simplify the server design and [bill of materials] costs to keep the system cost-effective,” said Neil Shah, co-founder and vice president for research at Counterpoint Research.
4. AMD patches microcode security holes after accidental early disclosure
AMD issued two patches in February for severe microcode security flaws, defects that AMD said “could lead to the loss of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) protection.” The bugs were inadvertently revealed by a partner, and AMD hustled to deliver the patches. Matt Kimball, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said he believed AMD handled the situation well: “It’s good to see AMD working with its community to solve for these vulnerabilities quickly. The amount of work that goes into providing a fix — and thoroughly testing it — is extensive… It is an unfortunate reality that these vulnerabilities find their way into systems, but it’s a reality nonetheless. The real measure of a vendor is how quickly they respond to mitigating and nullifying these vulnerabilities. In the case of AMD, the response was swift and thorough.”
5. AMD to build two more supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Labs
The collaboration between AMD and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) continues, with two more supercomputers planned to join the two that already are deployed. The two existing systems at ORNL are Frontier, an all-AMD design, and Summit, an IBM/NVIDIA design. They will be joined in the next few years by Lux AI and Discovery —two supercomputers that represent a combined $1 billion investment of private and public funding. “This partnership exemplifies public-private collaboration at its best,” said AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su in a statement announcing the news in October.
6. AMD/OpenAI pact means new enterprise IT options
October’s announcement that OpenAI and AMD have struck a deal could mean that AMD chips may become a viable enterprise IT option. That is good news considering the limits of Nvidia chip availability. Two companies said they would work together and that they have crafted “a 6 gigawatt agreement to power OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs. The first one gigawatt deployment of AMD Instinct MI450 GPUs is set to begin in the second half of 2026.” That likely means anywhere from 3.5 million to 5 million chips, according to Moor Insights & Strategy. “AMD is now able to seed the market with a lot of its GPUs,” said Kimball of Moor Insights & Strategy.
7. AMD continues to take server share from Intel
AMD continues to take market share from Intel, growing at a faster rate and closing the gap between the two companies to the narrowest it has ever been. In the first quarter of 2025, AMD’s share of the server marketplace rose to 27.2%, up sequentially from 25.7% and up year-over-year from 23.6% in Q1 of 2024, according to data from Mercury Research. Conversely, Intel continues to shed market share, falling to 72.8% in Q1 of 2025, down from 74.3% in Q4 of 2024 and down from 76.4% in Q1 of 2024. Dean McCarron, president of Mercury, said it’s mostly a case of AMD growing faster than Intel. “AMD’s growth rate in the quarter was multiples of Intel’s, resulting in significant server share gains,” he said in a research note.
8. DigitalOcean teams with AMD for low-cost GPU access
Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean Holdings in June announced a collaboration with AMD to provide DigitalOcean customers with low-cost access to AMD Instinct GPUs. DigitalOcean already offers access to the Instinct GPUs but in bare metal instances. It will now offer what it calls GPU Droplets, which are built on virtualized hardware. DigitalOcean offers a Kubernetes package that can be used with GPU Droplets should customers want to use a Kubernetes-based system, according to Bratin Saha, chief product and technology officer of DigitalOcean.
9. IBM, AMD team on quantum computing
IBM and AMD announced in August that they’re working to blend Big Blue’s quantum computers with the chipmaker’s CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs to build intelligent, quantum-centric, high-performance computers. They plan to demonstrate how IBM quantum computers can work with AMD technologies to deploy hybrid quantum-classical workflows .
10. AMD acquires Brium to loosen Nvidia’s grip on AI software
AMD acquired AI software startup Brium in a move aimed at challenging Nvidia’s dominance in AI software and strengthening support for machine-learning workloads on AMD hardware. “Brium brings advanced software capabilities that strengthen our ability to deliver highly optimized AI solutions across the entire stack,” AMD stated when the deal was announced in June. “Their work in compiler technology, model execution frameworks, and end-to-end AI inference optimization will play a key role in enhancing the efficiency and flexibility of our AI platform.”
11. AMD, Nvidia partner with Saudi startup to build multi-billion dollar AI service centers
As part of the avalanche of business deals that came from President Trump’s Middle East tour in May, both AMD and Nvidia struck multi-billion dollar deals with Humain, an AI company that is chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia. The AMD deal did not discuss the number of chips involved in the deal, but it is valued at $10 billion. AMD and Humain plan to develop AI infrastructure through a network of AMD-based AI data centers that will extend from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. and support a range of AI workloads across corporate and government markets. AMD will provide its AI compute portfolio – Epyc, Instinct, and FPGA networking — and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem, while Humain will manage the delivery of the hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects.
12. AMD steps up AI competition with Instinct MI350 chips, rack-scale platform
In June AMD launched new accelerator chips and offered a glimpse into its AI infrastructure strategy, aiming to expand its role in the enterprise market, which Nvidia currently dominates. At its 2025 Advancing AI event, the chipmaker unveiled the AMD Instinct MI350 series accelerators and previewed a rack-scale AI infrastructure platform built on open industry standards. “The MI350 Series, consisting of both Instinct MI350X and MI355X GPUs and platforms, delivers a 4x, generation-on-generation AI compute increase and a 35x generational leap in inferencing, paving the way for transformative AI solutions across industries,” the company said in a statement.
13. AMD warns of new Meltdown/Spectre-like CPU bugs
JAMD issued an alert in July to users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack similar to the infamous Meltdown and Spectre exploits that dominated the news in 2018. The potential exploits affect the full range of AMD processors – desktop, mobile and data center models — particularly 3rd and 4th generation Epyc server processors.
14. Next-generation HPE supercomputer offers a mix of Nvidia and AMD silicon
HPE announced the Cray Supercomputing GX5000 ahead of the Supercomputing 25 conference in November. The platform will offer a choice of processors from Nvidia and AMD, even though the chips aren’t available yet and the system is likely not going to be available until 2027.
15. AMD outlines ambitious plan for AI-driven data centers
AMD in November held its first financial analyst’s day, where CEO Lisa Su told analysts the company is seeing insatiable AI demand. Revenue growth could climb to 35% per year over the next three to five years because of that need, she said. In addition, Su expects to see AMD’s data center revenue increase 60% over the next three to five years, up from $16 billion in 2025. The total addressable AI market could top $1 trillion by 2030, doubling last year’s stated target of $500 billion by 2028. That number includes all silicon, from GPUs and CPUs to networking equipment.
