AMD CEO Lisa Su expects the CPU market to grow by over 35 percent annually over the next five years. AI is (once again) the driving force.
The hardware market has been discussing the exploding demand for graphics cards for years; in recent months, memory has also been added to the mix—and now AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is shifting the focus to the next component.
At the Commonwealth Magazine Forum in Taipei, Su predicted that the CPU market would grow by more than 35 percent annually over the next five years, which would be an almost unprecedented pace in this segment.
Agentic AI as a Growth Driver
The Background: Until recently, according to Su, the CPU market was growing by only three to four percent annually, while the bulk of investment capital was flowing into GPU infrastructure—keyword: AI training.
However, the increasing prevalence of AI inference and so-called “agentic AI” (i.e., AI systems that independently plan and execute tasks) has unexpectedly driven up the demand for CPU capacity.
Su spoke (viaNikkei Asia)that the entire industry had not foreseen this development: “Overall demand for CPUs was significantly higher than any of us had expected a year ago.” Consequently, CPU supply capacities are currently tight.
The unexpected surge in demand can be explained as follows:
- GPUs pay off through the computationally intensive training of AI models; CPUs then keep ongoing operations running—in servers, laptops, and wherever applications are actually executed.
- The more AI systems are in productive use and the more autonomously they operate, the greater the load on the CPU side.
In a sense, this is the flip side of the AI boom: What was trained in the data center has to run somewhere—and that requires CPU resources on a scale that the industry had clearly underestimated.
Intel, of all companies, is striking a similar note: While the RAM crisis will soon be over, according to Samsung’s CEO, AMD’s competitor is also sounding the alarm regarding CPUs.
AMD and TSMC: $10 billion for Taiwan’s supply chain
According to the report, AMD is responding to the demand situation with significant investments. Su confirmed that the company is co-investing more than $10 billion in the ecosystem.
This is also expected to benefit AMD’s latest EPYC server CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” which are already in mass production using TSMC’s 2-nanometer process. Production is also set to expand to TSMC’s Arizona plant once the necessary capacity is available there.
