Nvidia (NVDA 0.22%) has seen its sales soar on the back of a few big customers spending heavily to outfit data centers with as many of the chipmaker's GPUs as they can buy. Its top three customers accounted for 34% of sales last year.
Amazon (AMZN +0.30%) is likely one of those big customers. The cloud computing giant spent over $93 billion in capital expenditures over the last 122 months, primarily focused on building out data centers for artificial intelligence (AI). That number will climb above $100 billion this year. While there's a lot of overhead, including buildings, server racks, networking equipment, and more, a good chunk of that spending goes to Nvidia for its leading-edge GPUs.
But Nvidia's chips aren't the only ones Amazon uses in its servers, and the company just sent a signal that a competitor could be taking up more space in its data centers this year.
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Amazon's newest AI investment
Amazon was caught flat-footed as generative AI took off in late 2022, but it's invested heavily to catch up with its competitors ever since. It made a $4 billion investment in Anthropic early last year, and it added another $4 billion in November. The most recent deal included a strategic partnership where Anthropic will use Amazon's custom silicon for large language model training and inference.
Amazon's custom AI chips are designed in partnership with Marvell Technologies. Marvell also makes networking chips and other data center chips among a broader silicon portfolio. Amazon made a small equity investment in the company in late 2021 well before it chose the chipmaker for its custom Trainium and Inferentia chips.
Amazon recently made another AI investment. Its first-quarter 13F filing with the SEC revealed a purchase of 822,234 shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD +7.74%). Those shares are worth about $90 million at today's price, which isn't a huge investment for a company generating tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow every quarter. However, that's still enough to make it Amazon's third-largest marketable equity holding in its portfolio.
AMD is Nvidia's closest competitor when it comes to advanced GPUs. It's also the only company Intel has licensed to use its x86 CPU architecture, which is essential for Windows PCs and servers. The chipmaker is well positioned to gain market share on both fronts (GPUs and CPUs), and Amazon's equity investment could signal an acceleration in AMD's sales to the largest cloud computing company in the world.
NASDAQ: AMD
Key Data Points
A $500 billion market
AMD CEO Lisa Su believes the AI accelerator market -- which includes GPUs and custom silicon solutions like Marvell's -- will grow at an average rate of 60% per year from 2025 through 2028 to reach $500 billion. While Nvidia will likely take the bulk of that spend, smaller companies are positioned to gain market share over that period with improved price performance. Not to mention, AMD and other chipmakers offer cloud providers a chance to diversify away from reliance on Nvidia, ensuring Nvidia's chip prices don't balloon out of control.
Indeed, AMD recently struck a deal with Oracle to deploy a cluster of 30,000 AMD MI355X accelerators, which helped push AMD's data center segment revenue 57% higher year over year in the first quarter. AMD's existing data center partnerships for its EPYC CPUs with all the hyperscalers put it in a great position to expand those relationships with its Instinct GPUs.
On top of the opportunity in GPUs, AMD has become a leading provider of CPUs for cloud computing. That can be attributed to Intel falling behind in technological capabilities relative to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, where AMD prints its chips. As a result, AMD can offer better price performance with its more power-efficient chips.
With better CPUs and a competitive GPU lineup, AMD should continue to take up more and more real estate in the hyperscalers' data centers.
Investors can buy AMD stock today for 27-times forward earnings. That's a premium to the overall market, but a discount relative to Nvidia, which trades closer to 32-times earnings. That said, Nvidia continues to grow faster than AMD thanks to its pricing power and scale, so it may deserve a premium to AMD.
Amazon very likely bought shares at a better valuation than investors can get today, but its stake in AMD is a strong indication that the chipmaker is continuing to make progress in gaining market share. Given AMD's solid CPU business and the upside potential of gaining share in the fast-growing AI accelerator market, the stock looks less risky than Nvidia at its current price.
