AMD, Rebuilt

In 2006 AMD bought the graphics company ATI for about $5.4 billion, a price later widely judged too high, and its 2007 "Barcelona" server chip shipped with a bug ⁶. In 2009 it moved its factories into a separate company, GlobalFoundries, and became a designer that still depended on its former plants ⁵.

By 2014 the company lost $403 million on revenue of $5.51 billion ¹, carried about $2.5 billion of debt, and bankruptcy was openly discussed ³. On 8 October 2014 chief executive Rory Read stepped down and Lisa Su, an engineer, took over ². In 2016 the share price fell below $2 ⁴.

Instead of improving the processors it had, AMD put its limited money into a new design called Zen. The first Ryzen desktop chips went on sale on 2 March 2017, followed by EPYC server chips the same year ². For the first time in years, AMD's best chips competed with Intel's at the top of the market. Investors moved early: year-end market value rose from $2.3 billion in 2015 to $10.5 billion in 2016 ⁷.

In 2018 GlobalFoundries stopped developing its 7-nanometre process, and AMD moved its leading chips to TSMC ². At the same time it changed how the chips are built. Zen 2, launched in 2019, puts several small compute dies next to a separate input/output die in one package, the "chiplet" approach, and scales up to 64 cores in a server chip ¹⁰.

Small dies are cheaper to make well: one defect ruins a small piece rather than a whole large chip, and the same piece can be combined into anything from a desktop part to a server part. AMD's year-end market value reached $53.7 billion in 2019 ⁷.

PCs were a shrinking market; data centres were growing. EPYC gave AMD a way back into servers, where each chip sells for much more. In 2025 AMD's revenue was $34.6 billion, more than six times 2014, and the data centre segment alone brought in $16.6 billion, about 48% of the total ⁹¹⁹.

In October 2020 AMD agreed to buy the programmable-chip maker Xilinx in an all-stock deal worth about $35 billion at the time. When it closed on 14 February 2022 the deal was valued at about $49 billion, because AMD's own shares had risen, making it the largest chip acquisition to that date ¹¹¹². The next day AMD's market value, $197.75 billion, passed Intel's, $197.24 billion, for the first time ¹³.

The lead was thin and did not last the year: at the end of 2022 Intel was slightly ahead again. Since the end of 2023 AMD has been larger at every year-end ⁷⁸. In 2024 it also agreed to buy server-rack maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion ².

AMD launched its Instinct MI300X AI accelerator on 6 December 2023 ¹⁴. The larger shift came with multi-year capacity deals. On 6 October 2025 OpenAI agreed to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, starting with 1 gigawatt of MI450 chips in the second half of 2026, and AMD gave OpenAI warrants for up to 160 million shares tied to deployment milestones ¹⁵¹⁶. Oracle ordered 50,000 MI450 chips, Meta agreed to up to 6 gigawatts in February 2026, and Anthropic up to 2 gigawatts in July 2026 ¹⁷.

Big buyers want a second supplier beside Nvidia ²². In the second quarter of 2026 AMD reported record revenue of $11.5 billion, with data centre revenue more than doubling from a year earlier ¹⁸. On 21 September its shares passed $600 and its market value $1 trillion ²⁰²¹.

We looked at how outlets in our sources reported the $1 trillion milestone between 21 and 23 September 2026: 22 articles from four countries. This shows only what our sources carried; outlets elsewhere may have covered it too.

Software. Nvidia's CUDA has been the default for AI developers for years; AMD's ROCm still has to prove it can match it at scale ²².

Delivery. The OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic agreements are "up to" capacity over several years, and the MI450 and Helios racks only begin shipping in volume in the second half of 2026 ¹⁷³¹.

Concentration and price. A few very large customers now matter a great deal, the OpenAI warrants add shares, and the market value reflects revenue expected rather than revenue already earned ¹⁶.