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.
