AMD slips as Amazon exec says company ‘not yet’ seeing heavy demand for AI chips

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) shares slipped 2% on Friday as an Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) executive told Business Insider that the e-commerce and cloud services giant has not seen enough demand for AMD’s artificial intelligence accelerators to sell them via the Amazon Web Services cloud service.

“We follow customer demand,” Gadi Hutt, who works at Amazon’s semiconductor unit Annapurna Labs, told the news outlet. “If customers have strong indications that those are needed, then there’s no reason not to deploy.”

Hutt, who is Annapurna’s Director of Product and Customer engineering, added that Amazon Web Services has “not yet” seen high demand for AMD’s chips.

An AMD spokesperson said it did not have a comment on Hutt’s statement, but reiterated the Dr. Lisa Su-led company has “multiple” public customers, including Microsoft Azure, Meta, Oracle, IBM Cloud, and others like Tensorwave and Nscale “that have talked about their use of the AMD Instinct accelerators and the benefits and the demand for them.”

The spokesperson also noted Meta is using AMD’s Instinct as the sole accelerator on the Llama 3.1 405B model, while Microsoft has said Instinct “provides them the best ‘price-to-performance’ for GPT-4 inference on Microsoft Azure.”

AMD showed off its first AI accelerator last December, the MI300x. The newest version, the MI325X, is on track to be sent to customers in the current quarter.

The company upped its 2024 guidance in October and said it would generate $5B in revenue from its AI accelerators, up from a previous view of $4.5B.

(This story has been updated with a comment from AMD.)