Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is having a moment. The stock jumped 2.6% in premarket trading Friday to $461.26, inching toward its 52-week high of $469.21. The catalyst? A flurry of announcements from CEO Lisa Su, who is in Taiwan making the case that CPUs are back—and bigger than ever.
Speaking at the CommonWealth Magazine summit in Taipei, Su laid out a vision where CPUs, long overshadowed by GPUs in the AI boom, are once again central to data-center computing. The reason: AI inferencing and agentic AI workloads—think AI models that don't just generate text but take actions—are driving a surge in CPU demand that the industry didn't see coming.
"The global CPU market is experiencing much stronger demand than we expected a year ago," Su said, according to reports from Focus Taiwan and Reuters. She added that AMD is ramping production capacity every quarter this year, with even bigger increases planned for 2027 and beyond.
A $10 Billion Bet on Taiwan
On Thursday, AMD announced plans to invest more than $10 billion across Taiwan's AI supply chain ecosystem. The money will go toward advanced packaging, substrates, and rack-scale AI systems, with AMD co-investing alongside partners to lock in manufacturing capacity through at least 2029.
The list of Taiwanese partners reads like a who's who of semiconductor manufacturing: ASE, SPIL, PTI, Wiwynn, Wistron, Inventec, Unimicron, Nan Ya PCB, and Kinsus. It's a clear signal that AMD is deepening its roots in the island's tech ecosystem, even as geopolitical tensions simmer.
Venice: AMD's 2nm CPU Family Hits Production
Perhaps the biggest news: AMD has started volume production of its Venice CPUs using TSMC's (TSM) 2-nanometer process technology. Su called AMD's early partnership with TSMC "a really great bet," noting that advanced chip manufacturing is becoming increasingly critical across the AI industry.
She also highlighted AMD's early bet on advanced packaging—the art of combining multiple smaller chips into larger computing systems. That approach, once a gamble, is now widely adopted across the semiconductor industry. The Venice family targets cloud computing, throughput, and AI rack workloads through multiple processor designs.
The CPU Market Could Grow 35% a Year
Su painted a picture of massive long-term growth. She projected the CPU market could expand by more than 35% annually over the next five years, driven by inference demand. The broader AI infrastructure market, she said, could exceed $1 trillion in the next three to four years as AI deployments spread across industries.
AMD's edge, Su argued, is its full AI infrastructure portfolio—CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs—rather than relying on a single chip category. "We offer a complete solution," she said, positioning AMD as a one-stop shop for AI computing.
China Still Matters
Despite trade tensions, Su said China still accounts for roughly 20% of AMD's revenue and remains an important market. After meeting Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing, she said AMD plans to continue working closely with Chinese customers while complying with U.S. export restrictions on advanced AI chips. It's a delicate balancing act, but one AMD seems committed to maintaining.
Packaging: The New Bottleneck
Amkor Technology (Amkor) is also in the spotlight. CEO Kevin Engel said advanced packaging has become a major bottleneck in AI chip production, as modern AI processors combine multiple chips into integrated systems. Amkor is deepening its collaboration with AMD and working on packaging tied to TSMC's Arizona operations.
"We are becoming more integrated with our customers as we move further into advanced packaging technologies," Engel said, according to Reuters. It's a reminder that in the AI chip race, the physical assembly of chips is just as important as the design.
For AMD, the message is clear: the CPU is back, and it's bringing friends.
