AMD, Super Micro and Palantir report surging AI-driven sales

Three companies that sell the hardware and software around AI reported quarterly results in the first days of November, each filing its release with the SEC.

AMD reported third-quarter revenue of $13,377m, up 45% on a year earlier and 16% on the previous quarter. Its data-centre segment reached $8,546m, up 97%, which AMD attributed to demand for its EPYC processors and the launch of its Instinct MI450 GPUs. AMD’s release said Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure were running models and workloads on the first Helios rack-scale systems. It guided fourth-quarter revenue to about $17bn, plus or minus 3%, and listed agreements to acquire World Labs and Taalas. Chief executive Lisa Su said the company expected growth “to accelerate further in the fourth quarter”.

Super Micro, which builds AI servers, reported net sales of $19.9bn for the quarter to 30 September, against $5.0bn a year earlier and $11.1bn in the previous quarter. Gross margin fell to 12.7% from 17.5% in the previous quarter, though it was above the 9.3% of a year earlier. The company labelled the figures preliminary and unaudited, reported $434m of cash used in operations, and guided fiscal 2027 sales to $72bn to $82bn.

Palantir reported revenue of $2.313bn, up 96%. Its release put US commercial revenue at $984m, up 148%, against US government revenue of $953m, up 96%. Futurum Group described this as the first time US commercial revenue had overtaken government revenue, and noted analyst caveats: total contract value rose 6% year on year, and guidance implied slower sequential growth in the fourth quarter. Chief executive Alex Karp framed the results around a “Sovereign AI” divide between “haves and have nots”.

Qualcomm, reporting on 4 November, headlined a multi-generational collaboration with Amazon for AI data centres and reiterated a fiscal 2027 data-centre target of $5bn; the release gave no further terms.

Taken together, the reports showed AI demand reaching revenue at chip, server and software suppliers, with Super Micro’s margins the visible cost. The shares of AMD fell sharply two days later in a wider sell-off.