AMD to 'substantially increase' chip supply in 2027 — but not for consumers
AMD's CEO said that the company plans to 'substantially increase' its chip supply in 2027Sadly this is chips for AI and data center usage, not consumer productsIf anything this is bad news for Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs, as it's AMD underlining its commitment to the AI sphere
AMD's CEO has assured us that the company is going to increase chip production in 2027, but while that might sound great on the face of it, this isn't good news for consumers.
That's because CEO Lisa Su was talking about making chips for AI usage in data centers, not consumer processors or graphics cards.
Yahoo Finance reports that AMD has been expanding its chip production for AI and that Su said: "We've been able to increase our supply as we've gone through 2026, and we're going to substantially increase our supply in 2027."
This was a comment made to the press during a visit to Taiwan, and the chief executive made it clear that part of the reason for her trip – which included a visit to Foxconn and TSMC – was to make sure AMD's supply of CPU and GPU production could be increased to meet greater AI demand.
The next stop on the CEO's trip is South Korea, where Su will look to shore up memory chip supplies and is set to meet with Samsung and SK Hynix.
On the broader topic of how AI is impacting us all, Su said that it could be "incredibly good for the world" while at the same time cautioning on the risks and the need to cooperate on the safety of this technology.
Analysis: consumers in the cold
There's no mention of consumer products – Radeon GPUs and Ryzen CPUs – here, and the fact that AMD is clearly focused on beefing up AI supply is bad news for the typical PC owner. If anything it might mean that next year is an even leaner time for chip supply for consumer products, especially given all the negative chatter there's been of late talking about memory chip supply in particular looking like it'll considerably worsen next year.
Of course, none of this is surprising – there's a lot more profit in AI accelerators (graphics cards), of course, and as a business, Team Red can hardly afford to ignore that. But it does underline AMD's commitments, and PC owners on Reddit have voiced their displeasure in no uncertain terms.
As one Redditor put it: "Yeah I have a feeling the consumer market will end up being 'whatever the data centers consider obsolete' soon. We might have to contend with buying used data center CPUs and GPUs soon."
Okay, so that's going a bit far. And yes, others are quick to note that you can't just stick an old data center GPU in a PC and run it – there are issues around the implementation and cooling, display output (which isn't needed for a data center card), and the fact that many of these AI GPUs simply can't run games at all. But the point remains: consumers are indeed getting the short end of the stick due to the AI boom, and that's been the case since the invention of the likes of ChatGPT and other LLMs.
It doesn't sound like the situation is going to get any better next year, and that's just another worry to throw on the towering pile of memory price concerns that has been steadily growing in height as this year progresses.
