AMD

• 1. Introduction

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  Advanced Micro Devices was founded on the 1st of May, 1969, by Jerry Sanders and seven colleagues who had grown frustrated inside Fairchild Semiconductor. Sanders, an electrical engineer who had been Fairchild's director of marketing, was following a path blazed by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who had left Fairchild to found Intel just ten months earlier. The question that would define the next half-century was already taking shape: could a scrappy band of Fairchild refugees build a company that could stand up to the giant they were chasing?

  From a $500,000 headquarters in Sunnyvale to a campus in Santa Clara that literally faces Intel across the Bayshore Freeway, AMD's story is one of legal battles, near-bankruptcy, dramatic reversals, and unexpected triumph. How did a second-source chip supplier become the company that, in 2022, surpassed Intel by market capitalization for the first time? The answer runs through courtrooms, silicon foundries, gaming consoles, and a generation of processors that no one expected to win.

• 2. The Sunnyvale Startup

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  In September 1969, AMD moved from its temporary space to a new 15,000-square-foot facility at 901 Thompson Place, Sunnyvale, at a cost of $500,000. That building housed the entire company, including a wafer production line capable of working at a 7-micrometer feature size on 2-inch diameter wafers. The founders needed customers fast, and their solution was to become a second-source supplier of chips already designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor.

  AMD's early competitive edge was not raw invention but reliability. The company guaranteed quality to United States Military Standard, which mattered enormously in an era when unreliable microchips were a genuine problem for computer manufacturers, telecommunications firms, and instrument makers. In November 1969, AMD manufactured its first product: the Am9300, a 4-bit MSI shift register. By 1971, its bestselling item was the Am2505, which was the fastest multiplier then available.

  By the end of fiscal year 1971, total annual sales reached $4.6 million. AMD went public in September 1972. By 1975, the company was producing 212 products, of which 49 were proprietary. That year AMD entered the microprocessor market with the Am9080, a reverse-engineered clone of Intel's 8080, setting the stage for a rivalry that would last decades.

• 3. The Intel Entanglement

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  IBM's decision to build a personal computer in 1981 triggered one of the most consequential business arrangements in semiconductor history. IBM wanted Intel's x86 processors, but its policy required at least two sources for any chip it depended on. Intel turned to AMD, and in October 1981 the two companies signed a 10-year technology exchange agreement, formally executed in February 1982.

  The terms were precise: each company could earn the right to manufacture products developed by the other, exchanging licenses for goods of equivalent technical complexity and paying royalties to the developer. AMD began volume-producing second-source Intel 8086, 8088, 80186, and 80188 processors, and by 1984 had its own Am286 clone of the 80286. The agreement also extended a cross-licensing deal that had been in place since October 1976.

  The partnership unraveled almost immediately after it was signed. In 1984, Intel internally decided to stop sharing product information with AMD, and eventually refused to hand over technical details for the 386 processor. AMD filed for arbitration in 1987. After three years of testimony, AMD won in 1992, but Intel disputed the result. The case reached the Supreme Court of California, which sided with the arbitrator in 1994. AMD was ultimately awarded damages for breach of contract.

  A separate copyright fight over Intel's 287 microcode ran concurrently, ending the same year with a jury finding for AMD. In November 2009, Intel agreed to pay AMD $1.25 billion and renew a five-year patent cross-licensing agreement to settle all remaining disputes between them.

• 4. From Clone to Competitor

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  AMD's Am386, released in March 1991, marked the moment the company stopped following Intel and started racing it. The chip was AMD's own clone of the Intel 386, developed through a process of clean-room design forced on AMD by the legal uncertainty of the 1980s. By October 1991, AMD had sold one million units of the Am386.

  In January 1996, AMD acquired NexGen for $857 million in AMD shares, specifically to gain access to its Nx series of x86-compatible processor designs. The NexGen team was given its own building and left to rework the Nx686 at its own pace. The result was the K6, introduced in 1997. Variants of the K6 managed to outperform Intel's Pentium II in some configurations, a claim AMD had not been able to make for years.

  AMD's first fully in-house x86 processor was the K5, launched in 1996. The name was a deliberate provocation. The "K" was a reference to Kryptonite, the only substance that could harm Superman, an anthropomorphization of Intel's dominance. The number "5" pointed to the fifth generation of x86 processors; Intel had already trademarked the Pentium name precisely because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had ruled that a bare number could not be trademarked.

  The K7 arrived on the 23rd of June 1999, under the brand name Athlon. It used a Slot A connector rather than Intel's Slot 1, avoiding licensing complications. In 1993, AMD's Am486 had attracted an exclusive agreement with Compaq, one of the largest PC makers of the era, showing that AMD had become a credible alternative, not merely a cheaper substitute.

• 5. The ATI Acquisition and GPU Strategy

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  On the 24th of July 2006, AMD announced it would acquire ATI Technologies, a Canadian 3D graphics card company, for approximately $5.4 billion: $4.3 billion in cash plus 58 million shares of AMD stock. The transaction closed on the 25th of October 2006. It was the largest acquisition in AMD's history to that point, and it fundamentally changed what kind of company AMD was.

  The deal gave AMD not only a graphics chip business but a path toward integrating CPU and GPU functions on a single die. An initiative codenamed Fusion, later renamed the AMD APU (Accelerated Processing Unit), aimed to move certain processing tasks from the CPU to the GPU, which handled them more efficiently. AMD eventually retired the ATI brand name in August 2010, absorbing the graphics line entirely under its own name.

  The graphics division was separated into an internal unit called the Radeon Technologies Group in September 2015, headed by Raja Koduri, giving it autonomy in design and marketing. Koduri left in November 2017, at which point CEO Lisa Su took on oversight of the division directly. The GPU strategy became central to AMD's pitch in both gaming and, later, artificial intelligence workloads. The Jaguar microarchitecture, a low-power descendant of the Bobcat design, ended up inside the custom APUs of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Pro, Xbox One S, and Xbox One X, providing AMD with a majority of its revenue in 2016 and, according to some analysts at the time, sparing the company from bankruptcy.

• 6. Going Fabless and the Zen Turnaround

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  In October 2008, AMD announced it would spin off its manufacturing operations into a new company called GlobalFoundries, a joint venture with Advanced Technology Investment Co., an investment vehicle of the government of Abu Dhabi. The breakup was driven by the escalating cost of each new process node. AMD's CEO Hector Ruiz stepped down in July 2008, remaining executive chairman while preparing to chair GlobalFoundries. Dirk Meyer became AMD's CEO. The spin-off was completed in 2009, and AMD became a fabless chip designer, contracting out production to GlobalFoundries, TSMC, and Samsung.

  The years that followed were brutal. Layoffs of 1,100 workers came in 2009. By November 2011, AMD announced it would cut more than 1,400 employees. A further 15% workforce reduction followed in October 2012. Rory Read, who had joined as CEO from Lenovo in August 2011, stepped down in October 2014 after three years. His successor was Lisa Su, who had been chief operating officer since June 2014.

  The architecture that reversed AMD's fortunes was Zen. Built from the ground up under a team led by Jim Keller, who arrived in 2012 and taped out the design before leaving in September 2015, Zen targeted an instructions-per-clock increase of at least 40%. AMD announced in February 2017 that it had achieved 52%. The Ryzen 7 series launched on the 2nd of March, 2017. By 2019, AMD's Ryzen processors were reported to outsell Intel's consumer desktop processors. In 2022, AMD surpassed Intel by market capitalization for the first time.

  In 2018, AMD began shifting production of its CPUs and GPUs to TSMC after GlobalFoundries halted development of its 7nm process. AMD revised its wafer purchase requirement with GlobalFoundries in 2019, freeing it to choose any foundry for 7nm and below while keeping purchase agreements for 12nm and above through 2021.

• 7. AI, Acquisitions, and the Road Ahead

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  In October 2020, AMD announced it would acquire Xilinx, the market leader in field-programmable gate arrays, in an all-stock deal. The transaction closed in February 2022 at an estimated price of $50 billion. Xilinx's brand was phased out in June 2023, with its product lines absorbed under AMD.

  The AI computing race accelerated AMD's acquisition pace through 2024 and 2025. In July 2024, AMD announced it would acquire Silo AI, a Finnish artificial intelligence startup, for $665 million in cash. In August 2024, AMD signed a deal to acquire ZT Systems, which builds custom computing infrastructure for AI workloads, for $4.9 billion. Between May and November 2025 alone, AMD completed or announced deals for Enosemi, Brium, Untether AI, Lamini, and MK1, acquiring photonic integrated circuits, compiler software, inference hardware, and AI software talent in rapid succession.

  By July 2025, AMD held 36.5% of the server CPU market, with Intel at 63.3%, though the trend has moved strongly in AMD's favor. In March 2024, a rally in semiconductor stocks pushed AMD's valuation above $300 billion for the first time. In October 2025, AMD and OpenAI announced a multibillion-dollar partnership under which OpenAI committed to purchasing six gigawatts of AMD chips over five years, with OpenAI receiving warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares contingent on undisclosed performance targets and AMD's stock reaching $600 per share. In June 2025, AMD unveiled the MI400 series of chips, the basis for a new AI server called Helios, aimed at the 2026 market.