AMD has predicted it will win more revenue than Intel in its next quarter, potentially marking the first time it becomes the dominant vendor whose main product is x86 processors.
The house of Zen on Tuesday announced its Q3 2026 results, which saw it grow revenue 45 percent year-over-year to $13.4 billion. The company’s Data Center segment won $8.5 billion of revenue, up 97 percent year-over-year. Sales of silicon in AMD’s client and gaming segment slid eight percent to $3.7 billion, a worse fall than the five percent fall that helped to sink Intel’s share price.
Intel, AMD’s great rival in the x86 market, offered revenue guidance of $15 billion to $16 billion for its next quarter, which would represent almost no growth.
AMD, by contrast, told investors it expects around $17 billion of revenue next quarter.
CEO Lisa Su predicted even better days are ahead.
“We think 2027 is going to be a very strong momentum year for both the CPU business as well as the data center AI business,” she said on the company’s earnings call. “We have said the overall company will grow greater than 80 percent, and for the data center CPU business, we will about double, and for the data center AI business, it will significantly more than double.”
Su said AMD is confident its supply chain can meet that demand.
“We have worked across our supply chain to secure the wafers, substrates, advanced packaging, memory, and other key components needed to support much higher growth next year,” she said. “We are also deepening our collaboration with our supply chain partners and investing alongside them to secure the long-term capacity our growth will require.”
The CEO added that AMD has “strong confidence in our ability to sustain exceptional revenue growth for years to come, with earnings growing even faster.”
If those predictions are correct, AMD will likely accelerate away from Intel to become the leading provider of x86 processors after years of challenging Chipzilla's lead. Intel would still have higher overall revenue, due to its foundry operations, but in terms of revenue earned from selling chips, AMD would become the market leader.
AMD is arguably already the server CPU technology leader, and while it is second to Nvidia in the GPU market has trounced Intel.
Even AMD's declining client and gaming revenue has an upside because it was the gaming part of the portfolio that created the problem. PC chip sales rose seven percent year-over-year to $2.9 billion. Su said strong sales of Ryzen mobile processors drove that growth.
“Commercial is becoming a larger part of our client business as large enterprises adopt Ryzen PRO PCs across their employee base,” she said, pointing to strong adoption at the world’s largest banks, automotive companies, and healthcare concerns. Big corporate buyers are often a source of bigger profits and/or steadier revenue, so AMD looks to be taking the cream off the top of the PC market rather than scrounging for SMB and retail scraps.
Investors liked what they heard, sending AMD’s share price up by around five percent in after hours trading. ®