AMD's feeling flush: plans to spend $4B buying back its own shares

Lisa Su
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD may have money burning a hole in its pockets, as the Ryzen and Radeon maker announces a program to repurchase $4B worth of its own shares.

What that means is AMD is looking to bolster its share price by buying up some of the shares it has issued over the years. The fewer shares in the open market, the less diluted the share pool, the higher the value of each share. Capeesh?

"Today's announcement reflects our confidence in AMD's business and the successful execution of our multi-year growth strategy," Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO, says. "Our strong financial results and growing cash generation enable us to invest in the business and begin returning capital to our shareholders."

It makes sense for a company in its prime who wants to push up its share price, and invest in its own value while rewarding its shareholders, whose shares will go up in value as and when AMD buys back large quantities of shares.

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The total value of AMD's outstanding shares, its market cap, is currently a little over $92B. That's subject to change over the years, however—ideally AMD will want that to go up, meaning how many shares AMD can buy back with its $4B will change over time. It's quite a few, anyways.

There's no doubt that AMD is riding high after some of its best years in the company's history. The company's revenue for the first three months of 2021 was $3.45B, an increase of 93% year on year

And Dr. Lisa Su is clearly keen on putting that right back into the biz. Not only with this buyback scheme but also AMD's recent $35B acquisition of Xilinx.

Jacob Ridley
Senior Hardware Editor

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. Since then he's joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor, where he spends his days reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.