SAN FRANCISCO, March 4, 2026, 07:57 (PST)
On Tuesday, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su said the company’s CoWoS capacity will be sufficient to support high-volume rack-scale AI system shipments in the back half of the year. That’s when AMD sees its MI450 product line ramping sharply. CoWoS is the advanced chip packaging technology linking processors to high-bandwidth memory. AMD stock traded up 3.1% at $196.91 during morning hours.
The remark comes as bottlenecks shift to the “back end” of semiconductor supply. Taiwan’s ASE Technology Holding—largest globally in chip packaging and testing—said last month it sees its advanced packaging segment hitting $3.2 billion in 2026, doubling from current levels. Reuters
AMD faces a bigger hurdle than just supply: converting AI hardware demand into consistent revenue and profit. Shares dropped 13% on Feb. 4, after the company projected quarterly sales that missed the mark. Investors, according to Reuters, had already been casting doubt on AMD’s prospects against Nvidia, the heavyweight in AI chips.
The stakes keep climbing for AMD as it inks heftier, longer-term agreements. According to Reuters, the company struck a deal worth as much as $60 billion to supply AI chips to Meta Platforms over five years—a pact that also hands Meta an option to acquire up to 10% of AMD. “Meta is locking in supply, diversifying away from a single vendor,” said Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, back then. Reuters
Last year, AMD landed a supply agreement with OpenAI, which came with a warrant giving OpenAI the option to acquire nearly 10% of the chipmaker, Reuters reported in October. “We view this deal as certainly transformative,” AMD executive vice president Forrest Norrod said to Reuters at the time. Reuters
AMD isn’t stopping with data centers. The company is now pushing its “AI PC” agenda into desktop territory, adding a neural processing unit—NPU—to its mainstream lineup. At Mobile World Congress this week, AMD took the wraps off its Ryzen AI 400 desktop processors, which deliver up to 50 TOPS, or trillion operations per second, in NPU performance. PC makers are set to roll out systems based on the new chips starting in the second quarter, according to AMD. “The desktop PC is evolving from a tool you use to an intelligent assistant that works alongside you,” said Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president. AMD
According to AMD, the Pro models are aimed at business desktop users looking for standard NPU features, plus management and security baked in across both desktops and laptops. In a blog post tied to the launch, AMD pointed to IDC research and flagged 2026 as a potential turning point for AI PCs reaching the mainstream.
Competitors are moving quickly, and there’s less and less daylight between discussions about “CPU” and “AI.” Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told analysts, “We love CPUs as well as GPUs.” He made the case that AI “agents”—software built for tasks like document sorting or code generation—could end up pushing more workloads back onto processors, a field long ruled by Intel and AMD. Reuters
Still, there’s no guarantee the desktop AI push will catch on. TechRadar noted initial feedback on the Ryzen AI 400 series has been all over the map—some potential buyers are skeptical about swapping stronger integrated graphics for a beefier NPU, and a few pointed out that the real test will be how AMD prices the chips and whether the features are worth it.
