The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street are fixated on the fourth quarter when the company will launch its GPU chips to accelerate and run AI in data centres.

This is because rival Nvidia doesn’t need to wait until the end of the year to cash in on AI. In fact, it just told its investors last quarter that it expects a significant boost from its graphics accelerator chips in July, one factor that could fuel record quarterly revenue.

AMD’s roadmap is to launch its MI300 family of chips in the fourth quarter, and it is currently sampling them with its leading AI, high-performance computing and cloud customers.

Listening to AMD’s post-results call, it appears that many analysts, instead of focusing on the ongoing quarter, leapt to the fourth quarter and beyond, to get a sense of how much revenue AMD expects from MI300.

Chief Executive Lisa Su told analysts she expected a significant ramp in the second half for our data-centre business and weighted toward the fourth quarter.  She expects roughly 50 per cent growth in the year's second half relative to the first half.

When another analyst asked if she was expecting GPU sales of around $500 million this year, Su cautioned that she did not want to go into that level of granularity.

“I think your number may be a little bit high in terms of the GPU sales,” she replied, reiterating a point from Chief Financial Officer Jean Hu, who projected high-single-digit growth in the company’s data centre business year-over-year.

“As we go into 2024…the customer interest on MI300 X is very high,” Su said. “There are a number of customers that are looking to deploy as quickly as possible, so we would expect early deployment as we go into the first half of 2024, and then we would expect more volume in the second half of 2024 as those things fully qualify.”

Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon warned investors against “lofty expectations for the business in 2024 and beyond.” But because AMD is just sampling their AI GPUs in Q3, “real volume might not be until the second half of next year, which might make it prudent to temper some of those expectations,” Rasgon said in his preview note to clients last week.

So far investors have been happy with the responses from AMD’s management,  but AMD will need to ensure it meets all its deadlines.

It faces big competition from Nvidia, Intel and startups like Cerebras Systems. Customers who want to get their AI initiatives off the ground might move to a designer with the most available chips.