AMD Data Center hits $8.546 billion as Google Cloud's 103% TPU growth looms

AMD and Alphabet reported third-quarter results within a week of each other, and both point to the same contest in AI accelerators. AMD's Data Center sales nearly doubled, while Google Cloud revenue grew 103%, helped by TPU system sales to outside customers. Investors usually treat Nvidia as AMD's main rival, but Google may be the quieter threat.

The relationship is awkward because Google Cloud runs instances on 5th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, so AMD still sells Google processors even as TPUs compete for accelerator budgets. AMD is designing MI500 and MI600 together with frontier labs and buying Taalas for specialized inference silicon, moves that show it takes custom chips seriously. Alphabet's quarterly capital spending hit $51.355 billion, up 114%, as it builds out the full stack.

AMD guided fourth-quarter revenue to about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%, and CEO Lisa Su said demand is higher than supply. Whether that shortage pushes impatient buyers toward TPU capacity, and how specific Google gets about its TPU customers, remain open, since 'a wide range' remains vague. AMD expects revenue to grow more than 80% in 2027, and its shares are up 158.17% year to date, while Alphabet's shares are down 6.06% over the same stretch. AMD is the purer AI hardware growth story, but its second-place position looks less secure now that a capable rival also buys its chips.