AMD reports its second-quarter results after the US market close on Tuesday, with the market setting a high bar for its artificial-intelligence business. The company guided to about $11.2 billion in revenue, roughly 46% more than a year ago. Wall Street analysts are looking for a little more, near $11.3 billion, with adjusted earnings of $1.61 a share.
The harder question sits beneath those headline numbers: whether a recent run of large chip commitments turns into revenue on schedule. Almost all of the new deals are "up to" figures spread across 2027 and later, so they will not appear in Tuesday's data-center line.
Most of AMD's growth comes from its data-center unit, which sells server processors and the Instinct GPUs used to train and run AI models. Analysts polled ahead of the report expect around $6.5 billion in data-center revenue, split into roughly $4 billion from EPYC server chips and $2.5 billion from AI accelerators. In the prior quarter the segment brought in a record $5.8 billion, up 57% from a year earlier, and for the first time accounted for more than half of AMD's total sales.
That test follows a run of deal announcements. In late July, AMD said Anthropic would deploy up to 2 gigawatts of computing capacity — a measure of the power needed to run data centers full of its coming MI450 chips — and that AMD would invest up to $5 billion in the AI lab. That came on top of six-gigawatt commitments from both Meta and OpenAI, plus a 50,000-chip order from Oracle. AMD also moved its Helios system into full production; Helios packs MI450-series GPUs, EPYC processors and networking into a single rack that costs about $5 million to $5.5 million. First Helios shipments are due at the end of the third quarter, and the Anthropic rollout starts in the first half of 2027.
The outside view is bullish but not uniform. Christopher Rolland, a semiconductor analyst at Susquehanna, raised his price target to $500 from $450. He expects more than $31.5 billion in AMD data-center revenue this year, with server chips and GPUs both speeding up in the fourth quarter. Brian Colello of Morningstar, who lifted his fair-value estimate to $530 in late July, is more measured. AMD "may play second fiddle to Nvidia in AI GPUs," he wrote, even as its GPU business grows more valuable.
The stock has roughly doubled in 2026 and closed Monday near $485, which leaves little room for disappointment. History underlines the risk: AMD has beaten earnings estimates in 10 of its past 12 quarters, yet shares fell the day after each of its last four reports. Options traders are pricing a swing of nearly 9% in either direction.
What matters most is not the quarter itself but the guidance and the tone around the MI450 ramp. That is the clearest signal of whether AMD's push to challenge Nvidia in AI chips is turning into durable growth or running on expectation. Investors will get that answer, and the market's verdict, within minutes of the release.
