As the market's attention is focusing on AMD's confirmation on having TSMC produce its latest Instinct MI300 series generative AI accelerator to be released in the fourth quarter of the year, AMD CEO Lisa Su disclosed that AMD's server market share has continued to progress and has exceeded 25%.
When answering a DIGITIMES reporter's question at a recent press conference in Taipei, Su said, "We did make good progress on our CPU business. I actually think our server market share is higher than 20%, ... should be over 25%."
That means AMD's performance has surpassed the DIGITIMES Research analyst's previous estimate. DIGITIMES analyst focusing primarily on the server industry anticipates that AMD's share will well stand above 20% in 2023, while Arm will get 8%.
That implies another jump of 7-8 percentage points from the end of 2022. According to Mercury Research, AMD's total market share grew from 10.7% at the start of 2022 to 17.6% at the end of the year, while Intel fell from 89.3% at the start of the year to 82.4%. AMD's total share of the CPU market (excluding IoT and custom silicon) rose from 23.3% in 2021 to 29.6%, while Intel's share fell from 76.7% in 2021 to 70.4% in 2022.
Now TSMC is the key for AMD to challenge the dominant incumbent NVIDIA in the AI GPU market, even though the latter also depends on TSMC for foundry works.
"MI300 is the most complex product in the world, we could not do it without the partnership with TSMC," Su indirectly denied South Korea media reports that AMD might shift its AI chip production to Samsung Electronics using 4nm process technology, by humorously asking reporters: "Do you believe Korea media?"
Besides TSMC, DIGITIMES Research analyst Stella Weng believes the supply chain partners will surely be happy to have AMD as an alternative to NVIDIA. "Currently, there is enough capacity to support AMD."
Market demand for high-end AI GPUs continues to rise sharply on ever-expanding generative AI applications, and Nvidia is firmly a dominant player in the arena while AMD is gearing up to catch up. Both US chipmakers will place wafer-start orders with TSMC for all their high-end AI GPU series products, according to industry sources.
Market observers believe that AMD's success can be attributed not only to its technology and strategy but also to its close cooperation with partners that offer advanced process nodes, specifically sub-7nm processes.
