Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) experienced a notable surge in its shares on Thursday, rising to 9.9% to close at $128.37. According to CNBC, this is the stock's best day since May, reaching its highest closing value since June. 

The spike follows AMD's recent introduction of new artificial intelligence (AI) chips that will compete against chip giant Nvidia in powering AI applications.

(Photo : PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images)
This photograph shows a AMD logo at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry's biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 27, 2023

AMD Unveils New AI Chips

The catalyst for AMD's stock surge was launching its latest products, including the AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators and the AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing unit (APU). 

These innovations boast industry-leading memory bandwidth for generative AI and demonstrate exceptional performance for large language model (LLM) training and inferencing. 

"AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are designed with our most advanced technologies, delivering leadership performance, and will be in large scale cloud and enterprise deployments," said AMD president Victor Peng.

"By leveraging our leadership hardware, software, and open ecosystem approach, cloud providers, OEMs and ODMs are bringing to market technologies that empower enterprises to adopt and deploy AI-powered solutions," he added.

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Early Adoption

The MI300X accelerators are built on the new AMD CDNA 3 architecture and stand out with nearly 40% more compute units, 1.5 times more memory capacity, and 1.7 times more peak theoretical memory bandwidth than the previous generation MI250X accelerators.

In the past year, Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market. However, major technology players have already embraced AMD's latest offerings as they look for an alternative to save costs and provide flexibility. 

Microsoft and Meta have committed to utilizing the Instinct MI300X chip, showcasing early industry adoption. Microsoft, in particular, has announced the Azure ND MI300x v5 Virtual Machine (VM) series optimized for AI workloads, powered by AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators.

Additionally, the El Capitan supercomputer, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and fueled by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, is set to become one of the world's second exascale-class supercomputers.

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