AMD says it has a major advantage in the AI chip race against Nvidia: being more open.
AMD has long promoted this strategy through its open-source ROCm software, used to program AI chips. Since ROCm is available as open source, it’s free for anyone to use, download, or modify. On the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said this software is at an “inflection point,” with open-source contributions up 10 times in the past year.
Two AMD executives spoke with Business Insider in July, prior to earnings, about how making some of the company’s major software and hardware products open-source gives the company a leg up over companies such as Nvidia and Qualcomm. In particular, they see this approach as an advantage over CUDA, Nvidia’s software that runs on its AI chips and is widely considered a moat.
There’s a reason for this, the executives say: it helps AMD cheaply tap into the skills and contributions of thousands of engineers to develop its software faster in a red-hot AI race.
“The power of the open source community is just unprecedented,” said Kirk Saban, corporate vice president of product, software, and solutions. “You can tap into all of those developers, and they’re essentially doing free development work for us. They’re upstreaming code into our code base, and you’re leveraging the best and brightest minds in the industry.”
AMD says its latest chips are the best for AI agents, largely because developers can improve the software through open-source contributions, said Salil Raje, senior vice president of AMD’s adaptive and embedded computing group. He called open source “a central pillar in our strategy.”
“We believe in getting the ecosystem to work with us, and we will use the same kind of strategy in the physical AI and robotic space,” Raje said. “In fact, the reason agentic AI works for our platform better than maybe the competitors’ platform is because our software is out in the open now.”
Chip companies, including AMD, have seen some volatility in the stock market lately, with a massive sell-off in late July.
While they have rebounded, AMD’s stock was down 9% in late trading on Tuesday after it reported earnings. Revenue came in at $11.5 billion, beating analysts’ expectations. Capital expenditures nearly tripled to $808 million, compared to the previous year.
As companies seek out more compute to power their AI systems, they’ve increasingly turned to AMD as an alternative to Nvidia. AMD’s stock is up about 193% in the past year, while Nvidia has gained roughly 20%.
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