AMD's Processors to Power Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD recently announced that its second generation EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs have been adopted by Microsoft’s MSFT Azure division to power its NVv4 virtual machines (VMs).

AMD’s hardware will enable Azure to provide customers with a cloud based virtual desktop capable of handling memory and graphics intensive as well as high-performance computing workloads.

Notably, Azure is one of the most popular cloud platforms in the industry. Per Canalys data, the platform had a market share of 17.6% as of fourth-quarter 2019, trailing only AWS, which dominates the market with share of 32.4%.

As a result, the deal win is expected to boost AMD’s revenues in the coming days and strengthen its position against likes of Intel INTC and NVIDIA NVDA in the highly competitive computer hardware market.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Price and Consensus

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Price and Consensus

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. price-consensus-chart | Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Quote

Client Wins to Drive Top-Line Growth

AMD has witnessed robust adoption of its EPYC processors in the past few years. Notably, the company already has a deal with Amazon to power the AWS’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

More recently, the company’s Zen 4 architecture based EPYC CPUs and Instinct GPUs were adopted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to be implemented in its El Capitan exascale class supercomputer.

Moreover, Google cloud recently announced that the beta of its N2D VMs on the Google Compute Engine will be powered by AMD’s EPYC CPUs.

These major deal wins highlight a positive trend for the company’s processors and GPUs and are expected to drive top-line growth in the days ahead.

Notably, the company’s revenues grew 50% in the fourth quarter of 2019 and the trend is likely to continue, driven by rapid growth in the cloud computing market, which is expected to witness a CAGR of 30.6% by 2024 per MarketWatch data.

Wrapping Up

AMD is well poised to benefit from accelerated adoption of its products in the PC, gaming and data center industries. Moreover, the growing clout of GPUs driven by increasing adoption of AI techniques and ML tools in industries like automotive and blockchain remains a tailwind.

However, growing uncertainty in the market due to the global coronavirus pandemic could turn out to be a roadblock for AMD’s growth. Also, increasing expenses on product development are expected to keep margins under pressure.

Zacks Rank

AMD currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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