AMD confirmed it will lay off 4% of its workforce to focus on “significant growth opportunities.”
It's unclear how many employees or which departments were affected by the cuts. AMD had about 26,000 employees as of last year, according to the company's annual 10-K filing. 4 percent equals approximately 1,000.
“As part of aligning our resources with our biggest growth opportunities, we are taking a number of targeted steps,” an AMD spokesperson told CRN. “We are committed to treating affected employees with respect and helping them navigate this transition.”
We have reached out to the company for more information and will update this article if we hear back.
This news was previously reported by Wccftech and comes after a mixed third-quarter earnings report. AMD grew both sales and profits, but its gaming division was down 69% from a year ago, and its outlook for the quarter was below analysts' expectations.
AMD is struggling to sell AI chips to rival Nvidia. One reason is lack of inventory. By some estimates, AMD will ship 224,000 GPUs this year, which is a lot, but not enough to satisfy large customers like Microsoft and Meta.
Although AMD's chips fall short of what Nvidia can offer for major AI training workloads, AMD positions its products as a superior choice for AI inference (i.e., model execution).
During the third quarter earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su tried to assure investors that the company's future chips will be highly competitive with Nvidia's chips. “Our next-generation MI350 series silicon is looking very good and is on track for launch in late 2025, delivering the largest generation-to-generation AI performance improvement to date,” she said. said.
It's going to be a tough battle. Consensus estimates are for AMD's revenue to reach $32.6 billion in 2025, an increase of just $7 billion. NVIDIA, on the other hand, is expected to have quarterly revenue of $33 billion, virtually all of which will come from sales of AI chips.
AMD stock has fallen about 4% since the beginning of the year.