CPU returns to the core of AI! Who are the big winners?
美國超微公司2026Q1業績直播
Key Takeaways (AI-Generated)
Financial Performance
- Q1 2026 revenue increased 38% year-over-year to $10.3 billion, exceeding guidance
- Free cash flow more than tripled to record $2.6 billion (25% of revenue)
- Gross margin was 55%, up 170 basis points year-over-year
- Data Center revenue increased 57% year-over-year to record $5.8 billion
Business Highlights
- Data Center is now the primary driver of revenue and earnings growth
- Server CPU revenue increased more than 50% year-over-year with 4th consecutive record quarter
- Expanded strategic partnership with Meta for up to 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs
- Began sampling MI450 series GPUs to lead customers
Financial Guidance
- Q2 2026 revenue expected to be approximately $11.2 billion (up 46% year-over-year)
- Server CPU revenue expected to grow more than 70% year-over-year in Q2
- Expect to deliver tens of billions in annual data center AI revenue in 2027
- Second-half gaming revenue expected to decline more than 20% compared to first half
Opportunities
- Server CPU TAM now expected to grow at greater than 35% annually, reaching over $120 billion by 2030
- 6th Gen Epic Venice processor built on Zen 6 architecture and 2nm process technology launching
- Strategic partnerships with Meta and OpenAI position AMD as core AI infrastructure partner
- Working closely with supply chain partners to meaningfully increase wafer and back-end capacities
Risks
- Increased competition from ARM-based solutions and X86 competitors improving supply
- Higher memory and component costs impacting second-half PC and gaming demand
- Supply chain tightness across wafer and back-end capacity, data center build-out constraints
Full Transcript (AI-Generated)
Operator
Greetings and welcome to the AMD First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press *0 on your telephone keypad. And Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Matt Ramsey, Vice President of Financial Strategy and IR. Thank you, Matt. You may begin.
Matt Ramsey
Thank you and welcome to AMD's first quarter 2026 financial results conference call. By now, you should have had the opportunity to review a copy of our earnings press release and the accompanying slides. If you have not had a chance to review these materials, they can be found on the Investor Relations page of amd.com. We will refer primarily to non GAAP financial measures during today's call. The full non GAAP to GAAP reconciliations are available in today's press release and slides posted on our website.
Participants on today's conference call are Doctor Lisa SU, our Chair and CEO and Jean Hu, Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer. This is a live call and will be replayed via webcast on our website. Before we begin the call, I would like to note that Gene who will present at the Bank of America Global TMT Conference on Tuesday, June 2nd in San Francisco.
Today's discussion contains forward-looking statements based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations speak only as of today and as such involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our cautionary statement in our press release For more information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. With that, I will hand the call over to Lisa.
Lisa Su
Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon to all those listening in. Today we delivered an outstanding start to the year driven by accelerating demand for AI infrastructure across our portfolio. Growth was broad based with every segment increasing year over year, led by 57% data center revenue growth. First quarter revenue increased 38% year over year to 10.3 billion. Earnings grew more than 40% and free cash flow more than tripled to a record 2.6 billion, driven by significantly higher sales of Epic CPUs, Instinct GPU's and Ryzen processors.
These results mark a clear inflection in our growth trajectory and a structural shift in our business. Data center is now the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth. And as AI adoption scales, demand is increasing not only for accelerators, but also for the high performance CPUs that power and orchestrate those workloads.
Turning to our segments, Data Center revenue increased 57% year over year to a record 5.8 billion, led by strong demand for our Epic CPUs and Instinct GPU's. In server, we delivered our 4th consecutive quarter of record server CPU revenue. Revenue increased more than 50% year over year with sales to both cloud and enterprise customers each growing more than 50%. Share gains accelerated year over year, reflecting the ramp of 5th Gen. Epic Turn CPU's and continued strength of 4th Gen. Epic processors across a wide range of workloads in cloud.
AI was the primary driver of growth in the quarter as every major cloud provider expanded their Epic footprint to support a broad range of AI workloads from general purpose compute and data processing to head nodes for accelerators and emerging agentic applications. Epic powered cloud instances increased nearly 50% year over year to more than 1600 with instances optimized for virtually every enterprise workload and expanded availability across the largest global cloud providers.
In enterprise, demand accelerated with record revenue and record sell through in the quarter. We expanded our customer base with new wins across financial services, healthcare, industrial and digital infrastructure companies, while also building momentum with mid market and SMB customers. We are well positioned to continue gaining share as more enterprises standardize on Epic across on Prem and hybrid environments based on our leadership performance and TCO.
Looking ahead, our 6th Gen. Epic Venice processor built on our Zen 6 architecture and two nanometer process technology is designed to extend our leadership across cloud, enterprise and AI workloads. The Venice family spans a broad set of CPUs. Optimized for throughput, performance per Watt and performance per dollar including Verano, our first epic CPU purpose built for AI infrastructure across the portfolio, Venice widens our competitive advantage delivering substantially higher performance per socket and per Watt versus competitive X86 offerings and more than two X throughput per socket versus leading ARM based AI solutions.
Customer demand is very strong with more customers validating and ramping platforms at this stage than with any prior EPYC generation and we remain on track to launch Venice later this year. Looking more broadly, we are seeing a meaningful acceleration in customer demand driven by the rapid scaling of AI workloads across both cloud and enterprise. Inferencing and agentic AI are increasing the need for server CPU compute as these workloads require additional CPU processing for orchestration, data movement and parallel execution in addition to serving as the head nodes for GPU's and accelerators.
As a result, we are seeing both stronger near term demand and deeper engagement with customers on long term capacity planning. At our Financial Analyst Day in November, we outlined the server CPU market growing at approximately 18% annually over the next three to five years. Based on the demand signals we are seeing today and the structural increase in CPU compute requirements driven by agentic AI, we now expect the server CPU Tam to grow at greater than 35% annually, reaching over $120 billion by 2030.
In response to this demand, we are working closely with our supply chain partners to meaningfully increase our wafer and back end capacities to support this growth. As a result, we now expect server CPU revenue to grow by more than 70% year over year in the second quarter with robust growth continuing through the second-half of 2026 and into 2027 as we ramp our next generation Epic processors.
Now turning to our data center AI business, revenue grew by a significant double digit percentage year over year as adoption of Instinct accelerates across cloud, enterprise, sovereign and supercomputing customers. We're seeing strong momentum as customers move from pilots to large scale production deployments, particularly in inference where our leadership, memory capacity and bandwidth are key advantages. This momentum is driving deeper long term customer engagements including large scale multi generation deployments.
A key example is our expanded strategic partnership with Meta to deploy up to six gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPU's spanning several product generations. Our agreement includes a custom GPU accelerator based on our MI450 architecture Co designed to support Meta's next generation AI workloads. Shipments are on track to begin in the second-half of the year leveraging our Helios Rack scale architecture, which integrates Instinct GPU's with Epic Venice CPU's to deliver fully optimized high performance AI infrastructure.
Together with our previously announced Open AI partnership, these engagements position AMD as a core partner to the world's largest AI infrastructure builders with deep Co engineering relationships and multi year visibility into large scale deployments. More broadly, Instinct adoption continues to expand across AI native and enterprise customers for both training and inference workloads. Existing partners are expanding Instincts across a broader set of workloads, while a growing number of new partners are deploying production AI workloads on Instinct, highlighting the maturity of our hardware and software stack.
On the software front, we continue to make strong progress with Rokham, improving performance, scalability and enabling customers to reach production faster. In our latest ML perf results, MI 355 X delivered strong competitive performance across the full suite with leadership results in multiple categories. We also expanded Day 0 support for the leading open models including the latest Google Gemma 4 family, Quen Kimi and others, enabling customers to deploy new models quickly with optimized performance.
To build on this momentum, we have significantly accelerated our Rackum development cadence through increased software investments and agent based coding workflows, enabling faster performance improvements and more rapid deployment of new capabilities. Looking ahead, customer pull for Helios is. Very strong driven by our leadership, performance, memory bandwidth and scale out capacity. Helios development is progressing well with strong execution across silicon, software and systems as we advance through key milestones.
We have begun sampling MI 450 series GPU's to lead customers and remain on track to ramp Helios production shipments in the second-half of the year. As we approach production, demand for MI450 series GPU continues to strengthen with lead customer forecasts now exceeding our initial plans and a growing number of new customers engaging on large scale deployments, including additional multi GW opportunities.
With this expanded visibility, we have strong and increasing confidence in our ability to deliver 10s of billions of dollars in annual data center AI revenue in 2027 and to exceed our long term growth target of greater than 80% in the coming years. I look forward to sharing more on our next generation Instinct GP, US Epic Processors, Helios Rack scale platform and our growing customer engagements at our Advancing AI event in July.
Turning to client and Gaming segment revenue increased 23% year over year to 3.6 billion. In client, revenue grew 26% year over year to 2.9 billion, led by strong sales of our latest Ryzen processors and continued share gains across consumer and commercial markets. In desktop, we strengthened our Ryzen lineup, including our latest X3D processors that deliver leadership performance across gaming, content creation and professional workloads.
We also introduced the Ryzen AI 400 series and Ryzen AI Pro 400 series desktop CPU's, spending our AIPC offerings across both consumer and commercial systems. In mobile, we delivered strong growth driven by a richer product mix as Ryzen 400 mobile PC shipments ramped and commercial adoption increased. Commercial was a key highlight in the quarter with sell through of Ryzen Pro PCs increasing more than 50% year over year as Dell, HP and Lenovo broadened their AMD offerings.
We also closed new enterprise wins across large technology, financial services, healthcare and aerospace customers. Looking ahead, we expect demand for our Ryzen CPU's to remain solid in the second quarter. However, we are planning for second-half PC shipments to be lower due to higher memory and component costs. Against this backdrop, we still expect our client revenue to grow year over year and outperform the market, driven by the strength of our Ryzen portfolio and expanding commercial adoption.
In gaming, revenue increased 11% year over year to 720 million. Semi custom revenue declined year over year as expected at this stage of the console cycle, while engagements with customers on next generation platforms remain strong. In graphics, revenue increased year over year led by demand for our latest generation Radeon 9000 series GPU's. We also strengthened our Radeon portfolio with updates to our FSR software that improve performance and visual quality across a broad set of gaming workloads.
Similar to the PC market, we believe that second-half demand in gaming will be impacted by higher memory and component costs and we are planning the business accordingly. Turning to our Embedded segment, revenue increased 6% year over year to 873,000,000 driven by strength in test measurement and emulation, aerospace and defense and communications, as well as increased adoption of our embedded X86 products.
Design Win momentum grew by a double digit percentage year over year with billions of dollars in new wins across markets reflecting the continued expansion of our embedded business from a primarily FPGA focused portfolio to a broader set of adaptive embedded X86 and semi custom solutions, significantly expanding our Tam. Our semi custom engagements also expanded in the quarter as data center communications and other embedded customers leverage our broad IP portfolio and high performance expertise to build differentiated solutions.
In summary, our first quarter results mark a clear step up in our growth trajectory with accelerating momentum across the business. Our client business continues to outperform the market driven by rising adoption and share gains, while an embedded design win. Momentum and demand are strengthening across our expanded adaptive and X86 portfolio at the same time our data center business. Is reflecting with strong demand for both Epic and Instinct products driving significant growth.
While we are still in the early stages of the AI infrastructure cycle, the pace and scale of deployments we are seeing today reinforce both the magnitude and durability of the opportunity ahead. As inferencing and agentic AI deployment scale, they are fundamentally increasing compute requirements, driving both larger scale accelerator deployments and significantly more CPU compute. AMD is uniquely positioned to lead in this next phase of AI with leadership products across high performance service CPUs and AI accelerators and the ability to optimize them together as fully integrated rack scale solution.
We have a world class supply chain and are making significant investments to expand capacity and execute at scale. With the momentum we are seeing across the business and the expanding market opportunity, we see a clear path to exceed our long term financial targets including delivering more than $20 in EPS over the strategic time frame. Now I will turn the call over to Jean to provide additional color on our first quarter results. Jean.
Jean Hu
Thank you, Lisa, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll start with a review of our first quarter financial results and then provide our current outlook for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. We are pleased with our outstanding first quarter results, delivering salvage revenue growth and earnings expansion driven by strong execution and operating leverage. First quarter revenue was 10.3 billion, exceeding the high end of our guidance, growing 38% year over year, driven by strong growth in the Data centre and client and gaming segments and the return to growth in the embedded segment.
Revenue was flat sequentially with continued growth in the Data Centre segment, offset by seasonality in the client and gaming segment and embedded segment. Gross margin was 55%, up 170 basis points versus a year ago, driven by a favorable product mix including a higher data center revenue contribution. Operating expenses were 3.1 billion and increase of 42% year over year as we continue to invest in R&D to support our AI road map and the long term growth opportunities and go to market activities as the business scales.
Operating income grew faster than top line revenue. Operating income was 2.5 billion representing a 25% operating margin. Taxes, interest and other result in a net expense of approximately 275,000,000 for the quarter. Diluted earnings per share was $1.37, up 43% year over year, underscoring the significant operating leverage in our model as we scale.
Now turning to our reportable segment, starting with the Data Center segment. Revenue was a record 5.8 billion, up 57% year over year and 7% sequentially, driven by strong demand for Epic processors and continued ramp of Instinct GPUs. Data Center segment operating income was 1.6 billion or 28% of revenue compared to 932 million or 25% a year ago.
Client Gaming segment revenue was 3.6 billion, up 23% year over year. On a sequential basis, revenue was down 9%, consistent with seasonality. The client business revenue was 2.9 billion, up 26% year over year, driven by strong demand for our latest Ryzen processors, favorable product mix and continued share gains across consumer and commercial markets. Sequentially, client revenue was down 7% due to seasonality.
The gaming business revenue was 720 million, up 11% year over year, primarily driven by higher demand for Radian GPUs, partially offset by lower semi customer revenue. Sequentially, gaming revenue was down 15%, consistent with our expectations. In addition, as Lisa mentioned earlier, we expect second-half demand in gaming to be impacted by higher memory and component costs. We now expect second-half gaming revenue to decline more than 20% compared to the first half.
Segment operating income was 575 million or 16% of revenue compared to 496 million or 17% a year ago. Embedded segment revenue was 873 million, up 6% year over year as demand strengthened across several end markets. Sequentially, embedded revenue was seasonally down 8% in better segment. Operating income was 338 million or 39% of revenue compared to 328 million or 40% a year ago.
Turning to the balance sheet and the cash flow, during the quarter we generated 3 billion in cash from continuing operations and the record 2.6 billion in free cash flow or 25% of revenue, demonstrating the cash generating power of our business model. Inventory was roughly flat at 8 billion at the end of the quarter. Cash, cash equivalents and short term investment was 12.3 billion.
In the quarter, we repurchased 1.1 million shares and returned 221 million to shareholders. We ended the quarter with 9.2 billion authorization remaining and our share repurchase program. Now turning to our second quarter 2026 outlook, we expect revenue to be approximately 11.2 billion ± 300 million at the middle point of our guidance. Revenue is expected to be up 46% year over year, driven by a very strong growth in our data center segment, growth in our client and gaming segment and the double digit growth in our embedded segment.
Sequentially, we expect revenue to be up approximately 9% driven by double digit growth in both our data center and the embedded segments and the modest growth in our client and gaming segment. In addition, we expect second quarter non GAAP gross margin to be approximately 56%, non GAAP operating expenses to be approximately 3.3 billion, non gap other income and expense to be again of approximately 60 million, non gap effective tax rate to be 13% and the diluted share count is expected to be approximately 1.66 billion shares.
In closing, the first quarter of 2026 was an outstanding quarter for AMD reflecting strong momentum across the business with accelerated revenue and earning expansion. We are very well positioned to build on the momentum as we scale our data center business, expand margins, Dr. continued earnings growth and the long term shareholder value creation. With that, I'll turn it back to math for the Q&A session.
Matt Ramsey
Thank you, Jean. Operator, we're ready to start the Q&A session now. I would ask the callers to limit yourself to one question and one brief follow up, but please go ahead and pull for a question.
Operator
Thank you. Thank you, Matt. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the queue. You may press *2 if you'd like to remove a question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. Thank you. One moment please, while we pull for questions. And the first question comes from the line of Joshua Buckwalter with TD Cowen. Please proceed with your question.
Joshua Buckwalter
Hey guys, Congrats on the results and thanks for taking my question. I'm actually going to start with CPUs, which hasn't happened in a bit. You know, it hasn't been that long since you announced the $60 billion server CPU Tam for 20-30 at the Analyst Day and, and it's very quickly doubled. Agentic AI has obviously gotten a lot of attention in recent months, but would be helpful to hear your thoughts on how this Tam is inflecting and changing so meaningfully in such a short amount of time.
And and maybe you could also speak to your confidence in hitting that greater than 50% share targets on the Analyst Day as your X86 competitor seems to be, you know, improving its supply and also there seems to be more momentum on the merchant and custom ARM CPU side. Thank you.
Lisa Su
Yeah, sure, Josh, thanks for the question. So, you know, first of all, you're back to the when we think about CPU, Tim, I mean, we've always said that CPU's are very critical part of data center infrastructure and you know, that's been where we've invested and we saw the first signs of, let's call it AI demand. Really pulling CPU demand, you know, last year and that was, you know, the reason we updated the Tam to, you know, let's call it the 18% CAGR or approximately 60 billion.
And you know, what we've seen is, you know, all of the things that we believed in terms of, you know, agentic AI and inferencing and all the CPU compute that is required is, is just happening and it's happening at a much faster pace. So, you know, over the last, you know, it's called the last few months as we've talked to our customers and we've seen how AI adoption is, is really unfolding. You know, we're seeing a significant more CPU demand from your really every major cloud provider as well as, you know, enterprise customers.
And you know, that the way that comes across is as AI adoption scales, you need more inferencing as inferencing scales, you know, and you do more, you have more, you know, agents and agentic AI, they all require CPUs for, you know, all of the orchestration and the data processing and, and these other tasks. So, you know, with that, we've looked at it both, you know, bottoms up, you know, in terms of talking to customers and having them, you know, give us longer term forecasts as well as just doing some, you know, clear workload analysis.
And yeah, I mean, it's a very exciting time. I think it's exciting to see, you know, CPU is growing, you know, greater than 35% to, you know, over $120 billion. And then, you know, when you think about, you know, AMD in the context of that, I mean, you know, CPUs are are critical for so many tasks that you are seeing a lot of a lot more discussion about CPUs in the market. But we actually, you know, view it in three categories, right? There's general purpose compute, there's the head nodes that really, you know, support the AI accelerators. And then, you know, there's CPUs just for all of the agentic AI work.
And, you know, to do all of this, you know, our belief is you need a broad portfolio of CPUs. And that's really what we have been focused on is building, you know, not just, you know, one type, but really a broader in terms of, you know, throughput optimized, power optimized, cost optimized, you know, AI infrastructure optimized as we've done in the Venice family. So, you know, when you put all that together, we're very excited about the larger Tam and we're also, you know, very happy with the traction that we're getting.
We're clearly feeling like we're seeing significant share gain as, you know, we're going into our current health portfolio that was ramped very nicely. Venice is extremely well positioned and we're working with customers right now on, you know, beyond Venice and what we're doing in those architectures. So we feel really good about the market as well as you know our opportunity to grow to a greater than 50% share of that market.
Joshua Buckwalter
OK, thank you for all the color there. I want to ask about the instinct side. So in the press release you mentioned that MI450 and Helios engagements are strengthening with customer forecasts exceeding the expectations and the pipeline growing. You know you certainly have the big public open AI and Meta deals. Was this comment referring to those engagements upsizing versus the announced initial deployments or was it other, other customers? And maybe is the increase on the MI450 timeline or is it MI 500 and beyond? Thank you,
Lisa Su
poor Josh. So we are very excited about MI450. Helios, we're seeing significant customer interest in those. Products as well. So you know, we have certainly talked about our our large partnerships with Open AI and Meta and those are going really well. We appreciate the deep Co engineering that has gone on there. You know, when we look at the totality of let's call it, you know, based on our current visibility, you know how those forecasts are coming in with all of our customers, we're actually seeing it above our, you know, initial plans that we had planned for 2027.
And I think the encouraging thing is we're seeing a breadth of customers who are now very interested in deploying at significant scale MI450 series. And those are for both training and inference workloads, although the largest deployments are for inference. And you know, based on, you know, all of that and the scale of of new customer interest, you know, we see a path to really get to exceed our, you know, original, you know, targets of greater than 80% tagger. And these are really your 2027 time frame.
Obviously, when we talk to customers, we're talking to them about, you know, MI 3:55. There's a lot of, you know, good traction we're seeing there MI450 and Helios I think for significant large scale deployments and that many customers are also very engaged with us on the MI, you know, 500 series and all of the opportunities there. So, you know, we, we feel like, you know, very, very good progress. And you know, the key is that we're, you know, continuing to to broaden and and widen the scope of both customers as well as as workloads.
Operator
And the next question comes from the line of Thomas O'Malley with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
Thomas O'Malley
Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. Lisa, if I if I get your numbers correct here in the March quarter, it sounds like you know, the, the server processor side of the CPU side grew over 50%. If you take it just at the word, it looks like maybe the data center GPU side actually grew in Q1. So I was curious around the cadence of this year kind of previously he had talked about really a back half weighted and then kind of more so Q4 weighted here. Could you talk about if that's changed at all?
And then the second part of the question is, as you go into 2027, clearly you're pointing out a lot of upside from the larger customers and then kind of the ecosystem around them with new customers as well. But when you look at supply, that's a major issue in the ecosystem today. Could you talk about where you're concerned on supply, if you are and then any gating factors as you look into next year, whether that be power, data center build outs, etcetera, or do you feel really good about the ability to grow? Thank you very much.
Lisa Su
Yeah, OK. A lot of pieces of that question, Tom, So let me try to get through it. So first of all, on the data center segment in Q1, the server business was you know greater than 50% the year over year. As we said in the prepared remarks, the the data center AI was actually down modestly because of the China transition. We had more China revenue, I'm sorry, sequentially more China revenue in Q4 and it was less in Q1. But as we go forward, I think we see strong growth in both segments.
So we guided data center Q2 up sequentially double digits and that's a double digits in both server as well as data center AI and progression as we go forward. So first on the server CPU side, we talked about growing to over 70% year over year in Q2 and that continuing into the second-half of the year. And on the data center AI side, we will be ramping Helios in the second-half of the year. So let's call it starting with initial volume in Q3 with a significant ramp in Q4 and then continuing to ramp in Q1.
So you know that's kind of a little bit of progression. And then to your questions about customers and supply, I think I answered, you know, Josh, the, the customer question, I think we have, you know, very, you know, good visibility now into the deployments that are on track for 2027. And when I say good visibility, it's visibility down to, you know, which data centers are the GPU is going to be installed in. And so that's, you know, necessary just given all of the the constraints out there.
We feel that there is tightness in the supply chain. There are certainly tightness in you know sort of data center build outs, but we are constantly and our ability to supply to the levels of growth that we're talking about and to exceed the levels of growth that we're talking about. And we're also working very closely with our with our customers and our partners to ensure that we have good visibility to data center power and there is much more power that's coming online in 2027. And so with all those things in mind, I think you know, again, lots of things to manage. It's a complex ramp, but we're very pleased with the progress on the ramp.
Thomas O'Malley
All right, Tom, I think you shotgunned approached the multiple questions there. So operator. We can go on to the next caller, please.
Operator
Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Ross Seymore with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.
Ross Seymore
Hi, thanks for letting me ask a couple of questions. The first one is just on the Epic competition. Lisa, you went through some of the statistics of U versus X86 and U versus ARM, but I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that. How do you see AMD truly differentiating, especially when you're signing? Well, you see some of your competition signing up the same customers from the ARM side and the X86 competition having more supply. So I just wanted to see if you could dig a little bit deeper into how you think the market share is going to trend overtime.
Lisa Su
Ross, look, we're very, you know, we're very engaged with, you know, every major hyperscaler and in terms of understanding their needs on the CPU side, I think we have very much wanted to, let's call it optimize our CPU road map for the various workloads. I think we were early to call this, you know, AI component of CPU's and so we've been actually optimizing very closely with those customers. The way to think about this, Ross, is that, you know, you're going to need a broad portfolio of CPU's, like not all CPU's are the same.
You know, frankly, you're going to need different CPU's for whether you're talking about general purpose operations or you're talking about head nodes or you're talking about agentic AI tasks, they're going to be optimized differently. And we thought through that and we are, you know, absolutely optimizing across the various workloads. So from a competitive standpoint, we feel very good about where things are. And from a, you know, deep relationship, you know, with the customer said, I think we feel very good about that.
So from our current, you know, standpoint, I think the the depth of our road map just expands as we go forward. And you know, you shouldn't think about it as, you know, people are going to do one or the other. I think you're going to see people actually use X86, you know, and ARM for many of the large hyperscalers. And you know, even for those who are developing their own, they're still buying lots of CPUs in the merchant market for the reason that I just stated, which is you need different CPUs for the different types of workloads and you know, there's very high demand at the moment.
Ross Seymore
Thanks for that. I guess for my follow up, maybe more for Gene on the gross margin side of things. It's nice to see the gross margin popping up in the second quarter guy, but I just wanted to get some trends longer term, maybe not specific numbers, but how should we think about when Helios and the Instinct side really ramps in the fourth quarter and more so next year? I could see some offsets with that carrying a below corporate average gross margin. But then everything that Lisa talked about with the Epic side of things being significantly stronger might be more of an offset than it was in the past. So just walk us through the puts and takes of that and maybe directionally where you think gross margin goes over the next year or two.
Jean Hu
Yeah, Ross, thanks for the question. We are very pleased with how our gross margin is trending. It came in really strong in Q1 and also as you mentioned, we guided the Q2 higher at the 56%. I I think as we think about the second-half or quarter over quarter, as you know, they are some puts and the takes, right. I would just say from a tailwind perspective, we actually have a multiple tailwinds. Really are going to help our gross margin.
First is the service CPU, you know Lisa talk about the service CPU to expected to grow more than 70% in Q2 and you know continue to be really strong in second-half that really helps our gross margin. Secondly, in the second-half gaming actually is going to come down and our client business actually continue to go up the stack. So from client gaming segment, gross margin actually is going to be also very for embedded actually it's very accretive to our gross margin. Its momentum actually is continuing in the second-half. So we are really pleased with all the tailwinds we have.
On the other side, MI 450 will start ramping Q3 and the ramps significantly in Q4 that is below corporate average. So that will have different puts and takes in Q4 in the gross margin side. But when we sit here, when we look at all the positive trends, we have to really offset some of the gross margin dilution from MI450 side. We actually feel really good about the setup of the gross margin for 2026 and into next year.
I think some of the tailwinds I talked about that will actually continue. That's why we feel confident about. Continue to drive the gross margin. We actually during our Financial Analyst Day, we outlined the long term gross margin in the range of 55 to 58%. We think for the first year we're making good progress there.
Operator
And the next question comes from the line of Timothy Arcuri with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Timothy Arcuri
Thanks a lot. I wanted to ask about units versus ASP for server CPU. If I look at the June guidance, it sort of implies up 25 to 30% for server CPU. And you know Lisa you had mentioned second-half of the year, it sort of implies that server CPU could grow like 70%, you know, maybe a little more this year. And so I guess my question is how much of that growth either in June or for the year is like units versus pricing? Is the, are these price increases sort of you know mostly captured in June or is that also helping in the back half of the year?
Lisa Su
Yeah, Tim, the way I would say it is maybe let me let me bring you back to Q1 for a moment. So if you look at our significant growth in the the server business, it was actually although we were up on a year over year basis for both ASPs and units, it was actually much more unit driven. So we are shipping more CPU's, you know, across not just the high end, you know Turin family, but we're actually shipping a lot of Genoa's sort of the the Zen Four family as well.
As we go forward for Q2 and into the second-half, we are you know, guiding for a significant amount of growth. I think there's a little bit of ASP in there, but you know, the way we're thinking about pricing to be fair is, you know, we are in a range where the supply chain is tight and so there are some inflationary pressures. Costs have gone up a bit and we are, you know, sharing some of that with our customers. But we are also being very thoughtful in, but this is, you know, we're playing out for the long term.
And you know, that means that we are our, our, our goal is to ship more units and a lot more units. And so from, from that standpoint, you should imagine that the majority of the growth is unit driven. And you know the, the ASPs are just really to help cover, you know some of the inflationary pressures.
Jean Hu
Just to add what Lisa said, our ASP is increasing because the mix where actually each new generation, the call counts, those are increasing, but that actually drives the ASP up.
Timothy Arcuri
Thanks a lot for that. And then I guess Lisa also. So there's a lot of new architectures that are being used from, you know, multi tenancy all the way to low latency. And you know your competitor has talked about the low latency part of the market being you know 20% plus and they of course added to their portfolio there. Can you talk about how you see that part of the market? I mean, obviously you have enough business right now, you don't need to worry about that probably for now, but can you talk about that? Thanks.
Lisa Su
Yeah, sure. So look, I think what we're seeing is what we expected in the sense that, you know, as you go, you know, as the AI adoption continues, you know, and the volumes, you know, continue to go up and the the overall market goes up, you are going to see, let's call it different compute architecture is being used because you, you want to get more cost optimization from that. So we expect that, you know, even in that situation, you know, obviously the vast majority of the Tam is still going to be, you know, let's call it data center GPU's as the primary accelerator.
But you may choose to do optimization around inference around, you know, low latency around, you know, certain parts of the stack, whether it's decode versus prefill. I think that's very natural. The way we look at it is, you know we're developing a full compute portfolio so that CPUs, that's GPUs, that's the ability to connect to all accelerators as well as the ability to do customization for certain customers. And we've also talked about, you know, our semi custom capabilities and with all of those, you know, sort of compute capabilities in our tool chest, I think we will be able to to address very effectively a large portion of this market, including, you know, the low you can see portion of the market.
So you know, from our standpoint, this is kind of a natural evolution. Now how fast it goes depends, you know, a bit on the technology in terms of, you know, what share of the Tam these things become. But we should expect that there will be different variants and we're well prepared to address those different variants.
Operator
Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Vivek Arya
Thanks for taking my question. Lisa, do you think agentic CPU growth is incremental or is it coming at the expense of GPU's conceptually? So if you're. Raising server CPU Tam Are you also implicitly kind of raising? AI Tam. So just I'm, I'm, you know, interested in your perspective on what did you think a server CPU was as a percentage of AI Tam before and what is it now with this 120 billion number?
Lisa Su
Sure, Vivek. So the way we're thinking about it is it's largely additive to the Tam. So you should think about, you know, we need all of the accelerators, you know, to run these, you know? National models and then as these agents do work they they spawn. You know, more CPU tasks. So I would say largely incremental. The key is to make sure what you know we're seeing is in these deployments. The key is to make sure the ratio of CPUs to GPU's are are the right ratio.
So if you're installing a GW of compute, you know, the ratio, the, the percentage of, you know, CPU as part of that GW will will increase. You know, some of the, the conversation in the industry has been about, you know, CPU to GPU ratios and you know, it's very hard to call exactly, but you know, we, we certainly see the movement towards, you know, where in the past the, the CPU to GPU ratio was primarily, you know, just as a host node, you know, in the like a one to four, one to 8 configuration, you know, now changing and getting closer to a A1 to one configuration.
Or, you know, even, you know, you can even imagine if you get lots and lots of agents that you could have more CPUs and GPUs. So, but you know, all, All in all, to answer your your question, I think it's largely additive to the Tam. And you know, the key is that everyone is now planning and thinking about CPUs at the same time that they're thinking about, you know, their accelerator deployments, which is, which is a good thing, right.
Vivek Arya
And for my follow up, Lisa, you know, we, we continue to see memory prices go up. I imagine that is both kind of a cost inflation for you, but perhaps an opportunity to, to take price as well. I'm curious, how's that dynamic playing out for AMD and, and especially for your customers? Because you know, a greater part of their CapEx increase is really kind of this memory inflation tax, right, that, that they have to pay. So how's this dynamic playing out for you and for your customers? And, and the, the part that I'm really interested in is that have you secured enough supply, you know, versus your other larger competitor who has disclosed a lot of pre prepayments and and other things. So just how's this memory inflation dynamic playing out and you know are you kind of adequately supplied from from that perspective?
Lisa Su
So Vivek, let me answer the second one first. I think from a supply standpoint, we are very happy with our partnerships with the memory vendors and we have secured enough supply to you know, certainly meet and exceed our our targets. So it is a tight memory environment. Let me be clear, but I think we are very deep partnerships with the memory providers. And then back to your, your comments on, on the inflationary pressures, I mean, look, this is something that everyone in the industry is working with in the time of tight supply.
You know, we are seeing some cost increases on the memory side. I think we are all working through that. The, the, the way we're seeing and unfold in the market is, is actually on the data center side, you know, because of the, let's call it the demand for AI compute. I mean people are largely, you know, focused on supply and ensuring that the supply assurance is there. The, the corollary of that, you know, the larger impact that we're watching is, you know, the impact on the consumer markets.
And you know, as we said in the prepared remarks, you know, we are expecting that there could be, you know, some, you know, demand, you know, sort of the demand impact as a, as a result of the memory price increases on, you know, things like the PC business in the second-half of the year as well as the gaming business. So we're taking that into account in our, in our overall model. And you know, we continue to work closely with the, the memory providers as well as our customers to ensure that, you know, every time we, we ship ACPU or GPU that it's paired with the memory on the other side so that we, we don't have, you know, compute that is not being deployed.
Operator
And the next question comes from the line of Aaron Rakers with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Aaron Rakers
Yeah, thanks for taking the question and Congrats on the results. I want to stick on the on the topic of CPU to GPU. And as we think about the chart that you had outlined at at the Analyst Day, there there was obviously broken out between traditional CPUs and then the AI bucket on top of that. Obviously, I think the new forecast has a lot to do with the AI, you know, the CPU expansion. I'm just curious when you're doing ACPU in an AI workload, is there structurally a different level of ASP tied to that kind of CPU optimized for AI relative to a general purpose server CPU? Any kind of color or help when that would be would be useful.
Lisa Su
Sure. And so let me start with the broader question. The broader question, you know, regarding, you know, the way we think about the CPU Tam is again, think about it as 3 categories. So there is a, you know, traditional, you know, CPU. Use it's called general purpose CPU Tam that you know, is increasing, but let's call it increasing at, you know, a low rate, maybe let's call it low double digits. Then you have your AI head node, which is connecting to accelerators, which is, you know, also growing, but it's, it's, it's smaller.
And then the largest piece of the growth is this agentic AI, you know, piece, which, you know, we think is, is really stemming from all of the agentic processes. I don't, I don't have a, a number that I can tell you in terms of relative ASPs, because it really depends on the workload that is being run. And, you know, at what we see going forward is, you know, as core counts increase, you know, obviously, you know, we will see ASP increase and you know, that's what that's the direction that we're going in as we as we go forward.
But the the main point is the the largest portion of this. This is the, you know the agentic AI, the the the CPUs that are serving these agentic. Workloads in terms of the Tam increase,
Aaron Rakers
Yeah. And as a quick follow up, I'm curious you know how do you characterize the competitive landscape as we see, you know, some of some of the ARM introductions in the market. Just curious of of your views on on the competitive landscape and server CPU's? Thank you.
Lisa Su
Yeah, Aaron, the the best way to think about the server CPU landscape is, you know, again, number one, everyone is talking about CPUs so that that tells you how, you know, critical they are for the AI infrastructure. And I think that's a good thing. We feel like we're very well positioned, no question. You know, ARM is a is good architecture. It has a place in the data center market. You know, we view it as more, you know, point products relative to a, a portfolio where, you know, from an AMD standpoint, we've built this, you know, broad portfolio of, of CPUs going forward, which you're going to need for all of these different workloads.
And you know, we have in the Venice time frame added an AI optimized, you know, CPU with Verano in addition to our throughput optimized and you know, sort of cost optimized points. So from that standpoint, I think we're very competitive. We're continuing to innovate on, you know, architecture. We're continuing to innovate on, you know, both advanced packaging as well as, you know, all of the, the architectural pieces. So we feel very well positioned going forward. And the key is the Tam is much, much larger than anybody thought. And so there's a lot of opportunity for you know for different products to to be successful in in this area.
Operator
And the next question comes from the line of CJ Muse with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed with your question.
CJ Muse
Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I guess first question was hoping to speak a bit more about client for all of calendar 26. You talked about growth, expected growth, but would love to hear you know your thoughts around seasonality in the second-half. And I'm assuming that you are repurposing certain logic tiles from client over to the center and and would love to kind of better understand what the implications are for ASP on the client side looking into the second-half.
Lisa Su
Sure. So CJ, I think the client business has performed really well for us. I think if we look at you know, Q1, it actually was a little bit stronger than what we expected. We are seeing some mix shift in the client business. The mix that we're seeing is the, you know, the MNC or the notebook business is actually growing, especially the premium portion. We're making very good progress in the commercial PC arena with our AI PCs. We did see desktops a little bit, you know softer just given desktop is a more consumer focused market.
And so in that market it's more impacted by, you know, some of the memory pricing and the component price increases. You know, when we look at the full year, our, you know, commentary is we are planning for, you know, some demand impact in the second-half due to the, the memory pricing. But even in that environment, you know what we're focused on is ensuring that we continue to make good progress on the, on the commercial business and continuing to focus on the premium segments of the market.
So we believe that we will, you know, continue to grow on a year over year basis for the client business compared to compared to last year. And as it relates to you know ASP's, again it's a little bit of puts and takes between notebook and desktop. But you know, overall I think we're feeling good about our opportunity to outperform the market in client going forward.
CJ Muse
Very helpful and I that, that, that was perfect. Thank you. And then I guess the question on instinct gross margins, you know, with compute essentially sold out and and obviously you're building a business. So you know, one has to be I guess conservative on that front. But I would think outside of kind of passing through HBM that, you know, given the very tight wafer environment that this would be a place where, you know, you could look to drive your your instinct margins closer to your corporate average. How are you thinking about that, you know, either today or you know in the coming one 2-3 years?
Jean Hu
Hi CG, You know at this stage we really focused on drive the top line revenue growth on our instinct of family for products. I think on the gross margin side you're absolutely right is you know it's really tight. The demand for compute is tremendous. We actually are very strategic how we think about the how we work with the customers and of course the different customer also have different gross margin. I think overtime once we. Start to ramp our revenue, we'll have a lot of opportunities to improve gross margin, both, you know on the ASP side, but also more importantly on the cost side when we scale our business.
Operator
Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein Research. Please proceed with your question.
Stacy Rasgon
Hi guys. Thanks for taking my questions. For the first one, I I just wanted to make sure I have the near term AIGPU trajectory correct. So I know you said it was down sequentially in Q1 because of China. You had like 390 million of China revenue in there in Q4. Did the AI business in in in Q1 actually grow sequentially ex China because it doesn't feel like it given the server outlook? And then I'd look at what's maybe suggested for Q2. Are you thinking GPU's and servers kind of grow similar rates sequentially? Because it would probably put GPU's in Q2 below the overall level we were into Q4, which seems low to me. I'm just trying to tile that out. Could you help me with that, please?
Jean Hu
Yeah, So I think, Stacey, appreciate the question. I think if you look at the Q1, we didn't mention data center AI was down modest space up sequentially primarily due to lower China revenue in the quarter. I think on your second question regarding Q2, you're right, both data center AI and the server will grow double digit in Q2.
Stacy Rasgon
Yeah, but you didn't answer my my question didn't Q1 did it grow sequentially ex the China step down I guess is what I'm asking
Jean Hu
the China for our business in Q1 it's not material. So I think I will repeat what I just said is that, yeah, the the the revenue China revenue in Q1 is not material,
Stacy Rasgon
OK. OK. So you don't want to answer, OK, second question, OpEx for spending, but it sort of continues to blow past the targets. You kind of give an OpEx guide and then it blows through it and then you guide higher. So again, I'm not I'm not bothered by the spending. I'm just wondering why is the OpEx been so hard to forecast and how should we think about OpEx through the rest of the revenue growth?
Jean Hu
Yeah, thanks Stacy for that question. I, I think the most important thing is given the tremendous market opportunities we have, we actually are investing aggressively. If you look at the past several quarters, we really living in, in investing, but all the AI investment are driving the revenue momentum. So if you look at the Q1, we revenue was 38% up, but then Q2 it was what we guided 46% up. The investment are driving the revenue momentum.
Some of the OpEx increase of course it's applied to the revenue. When you look at our bid on the revenue side versus our guidance, we did bid on the revenue side, right. So that impact a little bit. But also at the same time you know we have a lot of customer engagement with our data center AI business. We do continue to make sure we have the resources to support all different customers.
Matt Ramsey
Thank you very much. Operator, I think we have time for one more caller on the call.
Operator
Thank you. Very thank you. Thank you. Our final question comes from the line of Blaine Curtis with Jeffries. Please proceed with your question.
Blaine Curtis
Thanks for squeezing me in. Lisa, I just want to go back to the supply side. There was a lot of story about your competitor restarting 7 nanometer. I'm just kind of curious as you look at that landscape which is quite robust through the end of the decade, do you think that the older products will stay around long and is there a way to think about the implications of gross margin in such a strong market? Is that actually a negative?
Lisa Su
Actually, Blaine, I don't think we see the older products hanging around longer. In our case, I think you know, it might be company specific stuff and in our case we actually see first of all, you know, we you know, turn is very strong. We actually crossed over, you know, 50% of our revenue being turned this quarter. General is is very strong. You know, we're still shipping some Milan, but I would say that's come down over time.
So it in. In general, people want to use the the more the. Newer products because they're they're just more, you know, efficient in, in every aspect from performance, from cost structure, from you know power standpoint. So that's what we're seeing. By the way, I should also mention, you know, in addition to you know, what we're seeing in the cloud segment of you know, server, we're seeing really nice, you know strong pick up in enterprise and there as well we're seeing our newer products do very well.
So from from our standpoint, it is all all about, you know, ensuring that, you know, we ship what the customer needs and in this case it typically is our newer products. And you know, we expect that to continue as we transition into Venice later this year. We will, you know, expect turn in general to continue shipping, but there's, there's a lot of of goodness and going to the new products.
And on the supply chain side, I know there's been, you know, a lot of discussion about how tight the supply chain is. The supply chain is tight. I would definitely say that. But I, I also think, you know, this is an area where we excel. We have very deep relationships across the supply chain on the wafer side, on the back end, capacity side. And you know, we are seeing meaningful improvements in that. And as our customers come to us with more demand, we are, you know, getting more supply.
And the good thing about this is we're now talking about 27 CPU demand, we're talking about 28 CPU demand. And so that allows us to just plan, you know, much better as we go forward.
Blaine Curtis
Thanks. And then just a quick one for Jean. I'm just curious to follow up on Stacy's question on OpEx. I guess I was a little surprised that SG and A is kind of outpacing R&D is just kind of curious is that startup costs, I mean, because in a strong market you wouldn't think you would have to discount or or have a big sales effort. So I'm just kind of curious for the year how you think about R&D growth versus SG and A,
Jean Hu
I think for the year you should expect us to grow R&D much faster than SG and AI. Think in the past few quarters we have been really building our go to market machine and we have been investing more in sales and marketing side. But going forward, you should expect the year of year growth, R&D will grow faster than SG and A growth.
Lisa Su
Yeah. And if I just add to that, Blaine, the places that we invest, Gene is absolutely right. We're investing the ahead of, you know, sales and marketing, but the places that we're investing in sales and marketing are paying off. So the investments are going into enterprise servers, they're going into commercial PC's, they're going into mid market small and medium business. These are places where AMD traditionally didn't invest, but now that you know, we have a much broader portfolio both on the server CPU and on the commercial PC side, it makes sense for us to invest because you know that that's sort of the the very best part of of those markets.
Matt Ramsey
All right, thank you very much everybody for joining in your interest in AMG. John, you can go ahead and close the call now.
Operator
Thanks. Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the question and answer session and that also concludes today's teleconference. We thank you for your participation. Please disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.
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