Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, testifies during the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening U.S. Capabilities in Computing and Innovation,” in Hart building on Thursday, May 8, 2025.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday unveiled new details about its next-generation AI chips, the Instinct MI400 series, that will ship next year.
The MI400 chips will be able to be assembled into a full server rack called Helios, AMD said, which will enable thousands of the chips to be tied together in a way that they can be used as one “rack-scale” system.
“For the first time, we architected every part of the rack as a unified system,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said at a launch event in San Jose, California, on Thursday.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared on stage on with Su and said his company would use the AMD chips.
“When you first started telling me about the specs, I was like, there’s no way, that just sounds totally crazy,” Altman said. “It’s gonna be an amazing thing.”
AMD’s rack-scale setup will make the chips look to a user like one system, which is important for most artificial intelligence customers like cloud providers and companies that develop large language models. Those customers want “hyperscale” clusters of AI computers that can span entire data centers and use massive amounts of power.
“Think of Helios as really a rack that functions like a single, massive compute engine,” said Su, comparing it against Nvidia’s Vera Rubin racks, which are expected to be released next year.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman poses during the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit, at the Grand Palais, in Paris, on February 11, 2025.
Joel Saget | Afp | Getty Images
AMD’s rack-scale technology also enables its latest chips to compete with Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, which already come in configurations with 72 graphics-processing units stitched together. Nvidia is AMD’s primary and only rival in big data center GPUs for developing and deploying AI applications.
OpenAI — a notable Nvidia customer — has been giving AMD feedback on its MI400 roadmap, the chip company said. With the MI400 chips and this year’s MI355X chips, AMD is planning to compete against rival Nvidia on price, with a company executive telling reporters on Wednesday that the chips will cost less to operate thanks to lower power consumption, and that AMD is undercutting Nvidia with “aggressive” prices.
So far, Nvidia has dominated the market for data center GPUs, partially because it was the first company to develop the kind of software needed for AI developers to take advantage of chips originally designed to display graphics for 3D games. Over the past decade, before the AI boom, AMD focused on competing againstIntel in server CPUs.
Su said that AMD’s MI355X can outperform Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, despite Nvidia using its “proprietary” CUDA software.
“It says that we have really strong hardware, which we always knew, but it also shows that the open software frameworks have made tremendous progress,” Su said.
AMD shares are flat so far in 2025, signaling that Wall Street doesn’t yet see it as a major threat to Nvidia’s dominance.
AMD
Courtesy: AMD
Andrew Dieckmann, AMD’s general manger for data center GPUs, said Wednesday that AMD’s AI chips would cost less to operate and less to acquire.
“Across the board, there is a meaningful cost of acquisition delta that we then layer on our performance competitive advantage on top of, so significant double-digit percentage savings,” Dieckmann said.
Over the next few years, big cloud companies and countries alike are poised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data center clusters around GPUs in order to accelerate the development of cutting-edge AI models. That includes $300 billion this year alone in planned capital expenditures from megacap technology companies.
AMD is expecting the total market for AI chips to exceed $500 billion by 2028, although it hasn’t said how much of that market it can claim — Nvidia has over 90% of the market currently, according to analyst estimates.
Both companies have committed to releasing new AI chips on an annual basis, as opposed to a biannual basis, emphasizing how fierce competition has become and how important bleeding-edge AI chip technology is for companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon.
AMD has bought or invested in 25 AI companies in the past year, Su said, including the purchase of ZT Systems earlier this year, a server maker that developed the technology AMD needed to build its rack-sized systems.
“These AI systems are getting super complicated, and full-stack solutions are really critical,” Su said.
What AMD is selling now
Currently, the most advanced AMD AI chip being installed from cloud providers is its Instinct MI355X, which the company said started shipping in production last month. AMD said that it would be available for rent from cloud providers starting in the third quarter.
Companies building large data center clusters for AI want alternatives to Nvidia, not only to keep costs down and provide flexibility, but also to fill a growing need for “inference,” or the computing power needed for actually deploying a chatbot or generative AI application, which can use much more processing power than traditional server applications.
“What has really changed is the demand for inference has grown significantly,” Su said.
AMD officials said Thursday that they believe their new chips are superior for inference to Nvidia’s. That’s because AMD’s chips are equipped with more high-speed memory, which allows bigger AI models to run on a single GPU.
The MI355X has seven times the amount of computing power as its predecessor, AMD said. Those chips will be able to compete with Nvidia’s B100 and B200 chips, which have been shipping since late last year.
AMD said that its Instinct chips have been adopted by seven of the 10 largest AI customers, including OpenAI, Tesla, xAI, and Cohere.
Oracle plans to offer clusters with over 131,000 MI355X chips to its customers, AMD said.
Officials from Meta said Thursday that they were using clusters of AMD’s CPUs and GPUs to run inference for its Llama model, and that it plans to buy AMD’s next-generation servers.
A Microsoft representative said that it uses AMD chips to serve its Copilot AI features.
Competing on price
AMD declined to say how much its chips cost — it doesn’t sell chips by themselves, and end-users usually buy them through a hardware company like Dell or Super Micro Computer — but the company is planning for the MI400 chips to compete on price.
The Santa Clara company is pairing its GPUs alongside its CPUs and networking chips from its 2022 acquisition of Pensando to build its Helios racks. That means greater adoption of its AI chips should also benefit the rest of AMD’s business. It’s also using an open-source networking technology to closely integrate its rack systems, called UALink, versus Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink.
AMD claims its MI355X can deliver 40% more tokens — a measure of AI output — per dollar than Nvidia’s chips because its chips use less power than its rival’s.
Data center GPUs can cost tens of thousands of dollars per chip, and cloud companies usually buy them in large quantities.
AMD’s AI chip business is still much smaller than Nvidia’s. It said it had $5 billion in AI sales in its fiscal 2024, but JP Morgan analysts are expecting 60% growth in the category this year.
The Hers app arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of Hims & Hers Health fell 9% in extended trading on Monday after the telehealth company reported second-quarter results that missed Wall Street’s expectations for revenue.
Here’s how the company did based on average analysts’ estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: 17 cents adjusted vs. 15 cents
Revenue: $544.8 million vs. $552 million
Revenue at Hims & Hers increased 73% in the second quarter from $315.6 million during the same period last year, according to a release. Hims & Hers reported a net income of $42.5 million, or 17 cents per share, compared to $13.3 million, or 6 cents per share, during the same period a year earlier.
For its third quarter, Hims & Hers said it expected to report revenue between $570 million to $590 million, while analysts were expecting $583 million. The company said its adjusted EBITDA for the quarter will be between the range of $60 million to $70 million. Analysts polled by StreetAccount were expecting $77.1 million.
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Hims & Hers has faced controversy in recent months over its continued sale of compounded GLP-1s, which are cheaper, unapproved versions of the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs. Compounded drugs can be mass produced when brand-name treatments are in shortage, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced in February that ongoing supply issues had been resolved.
Some telehealth companies, including Hims & Hers, have continued to offer the compounded medications. It’s legal for patients to access personalized doses of the knockoffs in unique cases, like if they are allergic to an ingredient in a branded product, for instance. Hims & Hers has said consumers may still be able to access personalized doses through its site if clinically applicable.
In June, Hims & Hers shares tumbled more than 30% after a short-lived collaboration with Novo Nordisk fell apart. The drugmaker said Hims & Hers “failed to adhere to the law which prohibits mass sales of compounded drugs” under the “false guise” of personalization.
Hims & Hers reported adjusted EBITDA of $82 million for its second quarter, up from $39.3 million last year and above the $73 million expected by StreetAccount.
Hims & Hers will host its quarterly call with investors at 5 p.m. ET.
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YTD chart of Hims & Hers Health.
–CNBC’s Annika Kim Constantino contributed to this report
Palantir topped Wall Street’s estimates Monday, surpassing $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, and hiking its full-year guidance.
Shares rallied more than 5%.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:
Earnings per share: 16 cents adj. vs. 14 cents expected
Revenue: $1.00 billion vs. $940 million expected
The artificial intelligence software provider’s revenues grew 48% during the period. Analysts hadn’t expected the $1 billion revenue benchmark from the Denver-based company until the fourth quarter of this year.
“The growth rate of our business has accelerated radically, after years of investment on our part and derision by some,” wrote CEO Alex Karp in a letter to shareholders. “The skeptics are admittedly fewer now, having been defanged and bent into a kind of submission.”
The software analytics company also boosted its full-year outlook guidance. For the full year, Palantir now expects revenues to range between $4.142 billion and $4.150 billion, up from prior guidance of $3.89 billion to $3.90 billion.
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For the third quarter, Palantir forecast revenues between $1.083 billion and $1.087 billion, beating an analyst estimate of $983 million. Palantir also lifted its operating income and full-year free cash flow guidance.
Palantir’s U.S. revenues jumped 68% from a year ago to $733 million, while U.S. commercial revenues nearly doubled from a year ago to $306 million.
The software analytics company has seen a boost from President Donald Trump‘s government efficiency campaign, which included layoffs and contract cuts. Palantir’s U.S. government revenues jumped 53% from the year-ago period to $426 million.
“It has been a steep and upward climb — an ascent that is a reflection of the remarkable confluence of the arrival of language models, the chips necessary to power them, and our software infrastructure,” Karp wrote in a letter to shareholders.
During the quarter, Palantir said it closed 66 deals of at least $5 million and 42 deals totaling at least $10 million. Total value of its contracts grew 140% from last year to $2.27 billion.
Net income rose 144% to about $326.7 million, or 13 cents a share, from about $134.1 million, or 6 cents per share a year ago.
Palantir shares have more than doubled this year as investors bet on the company’s AI tools and contract agreements with governments.
Its market value has accelerated past $379 billion and into the list of top 20 most valuable U.S companies, surpassing Salesforce, IBM and Cisco to join the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap. Shares hit a new high Monday.
At its size, buying the stock requires investors to pay hefty multiples.
Shares currently trade 276 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. Tesla is the only other top 20 with a triple-digit ratio at 177.
Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim sits for an interview at the Firefly Aerospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, on July 9, 2025.
Sergio Flores | Reuters
Firefly Aerospace has lifted the share price range for its upcoming initial public offering in a move that would value the space technology company at more than $6 billion.
The lunar lander and rocket maker said in a filing Monday that it expects to price shares in its upcoming IPO between $41 and $43 apiece.
Firefly’s new target range would raise nearly $697 million at the top end of the range. That’s up from the previously expected $35 to $39 price per share that Firefly announced in a filing last week, which targeted a $5.5 billion valuation.
Firefly announced plans to go public last month as interest in space technology gains steam, and billionaire-led companies such as Elon Musk‘s SpaceX rake in more funding.
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The industry has also begun testing the public markets after a long hiatus in IPO deal activity, with space tech firm Voyager debuting in June.
Firefly makes rockets, space tugs and lunar landers, and is widely known for its satellite launching rockets known as Alpha.
The company has partnered with major defense players such as Lockheed Martin, L3Harris and NASA, and received a $50 million investment from defense contractor Northrop Grumman.
Firefly’s revenues jumped from $8.3 million a year ago to $55.9 million at the end of March, the company said. Its net loss grew to $60.1 million, from $52.8 million a year ago.