AMD says it's going to beat Intel in total revenue for the very first time by the end of 2026
Intel's expecting to hit $15 - $16 billion for Q4 2026, while AMD is looking at an impressive $17 billion.
AMD has just posted another record quarter, with revenue topping $13 billion and its net income sitting at $2.4 billion. That is a lot of billions, and my brain is slightly struggling to comprehend it. But AMD's CFO and treasurer, Jean Hu, is projecting that this success will continue into the next quarter, predicting revenue figures of around $17 billion for Q4. Let's just compare that to Intel, which is expecting to continue posting flat, or slightly down, revenue figures of $15 - $16 billion itself.
Such a result would represent the first time that AMD has actually generated higher revenue figures than Intel for its lifetime. Or as far back as I can find the actual revenue figures for anyways.
Whether that will necessarily translate into a higher net income figure for AMD, I'm not entirely sure. Maths is not my strong point, and whether AMD's total revenue going up by another $3 billion will push its net income over the $3 billion mark where Intel currently sits I'm not sure. But it's going to be mighty close for sure.
But net income is not really the significant thing in terms of making history; AMD has been consistently turning a profit since 2018, and in the years up to now there have definitely been times when it has beaten Intel on that score, most notably in 2024 where Intel reported a staggering $18.7 billion loss for the year. AMD made $1.6 billion in that same timeframe. And last year AMD beat Intel again in the profit stakes.
Despite it being a punishing last quarter for Intel in terms of its stock price collapsing, the company did at least return to profitability.
Check out the data 👇
Quarter |
Intel Revenue ($M) |
Intel Net Income ($M) |
AMD Revenue ($M) |
AMD Net Income ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Q1 2021 |
19,673 |
3,360 |
3,445 |
555 |
Q2 2021 |
19,631 |
5,060 |
3,850 |
710 |
Q3 2021 |
19,192 |
6,823 |
4,313 |
923 |
Q4 2021 |
20,528 |
4,623 |
4,826 |
974 |
Q1 2022 |
18,353 |
8,113 |
5,887 |
786 |
Q2 2022 |
15,321 |
−454 |
6,550 |
447 |
Q3 2022 |
15,338 |
1,019 |
5,565 |
66 |
Q4 2022 |
14,042 |
−664 |
5,599 |
21 |
Q1 2023 |
11,715 |
−2,758 |
5,353 |
−139 |
Q2 2023 |
12,949 |
1,481 |
5,359 |
27 |
Q3 2023 |
14,158 |
297 |
5,800 |
299 |
Q4 2023 |
15,406 |
2,669 |
6,168 |
667 |
Q1 2024 |
12,724 |
−381 |
5,473 |
123 |
Q2 2024 |
12,833 |
−1,610 |
5,835 |
265 |
Q3 2024 |
13,284 |
−16,639 |
6,819 |
771 |
Q4 2024 |
14,260 |
−126 |
7,658 |
482 |
Q1 2025 |
12,667 |
−821 |
7,438 |
709 |
Q2 2025 |
12,859 |
−2,918 |
7,685 |
872 |
Q3 2025 |
13,653 |
4,063 |
9,246 |
1,243 |
Q4 2025 |
13,674 |
−591 |
10,270 |
1,511 |
Q1 2026 |
13,577 |
−3,728 |
10,253 |
1,383 |
Q2 2026 |
16,128 |
−11,033 |
11,536 |
2,297 |
Q3 2026 |
16,513 |
3,320 |
13,377 |
2,428 |
But total revenue is still something else entirely. Intel has remained relatively flat in terms of its own revenue figures, while AMD has surged on the inside. Its recent earnings call puts AMD at roughly twice what it was reporting just two years ago.
For the fabless company to be where it is, and where it's expected to be by the end of the year, is quite staggering. Especially for any of us who watched AMD flailing around in the mid-2010s. You've got to hand it to Dr. Su, the turnaround for AMD has been little short of miraculous.
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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