Can AMD's Saudi AI Buildout Challenge NVIDIA and Broadcom?
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Can AMD's Saudi AI Buildout Challenge NVIDIA and Broadcom? Aniruddha Ganguly Wed, September 2, 2026 at 2:47 PM EDT 4 min read AMD CSCO NVDA AVGO Advanced Micro Devices AMD, Cisco Systems CSCO and HUMAIN have expanded their artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure collaboration in Saudi Arabia, with AMD Instinct MI355X GPU-based systems now live and serving customers in the Kingdom and overseas. The production infrastructure combines AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and EPYC CPUs with Cisco Silicon One-based networking and 800G optics, enabling HUMAIN to offer GPU-as-a-service for AI training and inference workloads. The companies are now preparing a significantly larger deployment. AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN plan to deploy up to 250 megawatts (MW) of additional AI infrastructure beginning in 2027. The next phase will use AMD Instinct MI400 Series GPUs, EPYC CPUs and ROCm software alongside Cisco networking and critical infrastructure. Capacity is expected to start coming online in the second half of 2027. The joint venture remains on track to deploy up to 1 gigawatt (GW) of AI infrastructure by 2030, supported by growing demand for sovereign AI capacity. This is expected to boost AMD's competitive position against NVIDIA NVDA and Broadcom AVGO. The platform is aimed at governments, enterprises, research institutions, AI developers and model providers that require locally operated infrastructure. AMD is designed to support open models and software while giving customers greater control over data residency, model customization, deployment and governance. This strengthens AMD's presence in the growing sovereign AI market while broadening the geographic reach of its data-center AI portfolio. The HUMAIN expansion should strengthen AMD's Data Center business by adding another large-scale deployment for its Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs and ROCm software. AMD's Data Center revenues surged 107% year over year to $6.7 billion in second-quarter 2026, driven by strong demand for EPYC processors and the ongoing ramp of Instinct GPUs. AMD expects growing Helios and MI450-series deployments to drive significant Data Center AI growth, with acceleration in 2027. The company currently expects server revenues to grow more than 70% in 2027 and total Data Center segment revenues to more than double year over year. The deal also expands AMD's exposure to sovereign AI, an area where Instinct adoption was already increasing. AMD noted that Instinct sales more than doubled year over year as adoption broadened across AI labs, cloud providers, AI startups, national laboratories and sovereign AI deployments. The HUMAIN project could strengthen AMD's position as countries invest in domestic AI infrastructure to retain greater control over data, models and computing capacity. NVIDIA remains AMD's biggest challenge in data center AI, owing to its scale, full-stack platform and entrenched CUDA ecosystem. NVIDIA's second-quarter fiscal 2027 Data Center revenues reached $89 billion, with hyperscale revenues of $49 billion, and its ACIE business, which includes NeoCloud, enterprise and sovereign customers, reaching $40 billion. NVIDIA also expects roughly 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028 despite remaining supply constrained. This scale gives it substantially greater resources and customer reach as AMD attempts to expand Instinct and Helios deployments. Broadcom creates a different but increasingly important threat through custom AI accelerators, or XPUs, and networking. Broadcom's AI semiconductor revenues surged 143% year over year to $10.8 billion in second-quarter fiscal 2026, with bookings exceeding $30 billion. The company expects AI semiconductor revenues of $56 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than $100 billion in fiscal 2027. Broadcom has multi-generation programs with Google, plans additional TPU-based capacity for Anthropic, has a 1.3-GW OpenAI commitment for 2027 and expects to deploy 3 GW of Meta MTIA XPUs through 2028. AVGO's leadership in Ethernet switching, SerDes, co-packaged optics and interconnect also strengthens its position because these technologies are critical to scaling both XPU and GPU clusters. AMD shares have jumped 114.6% year to date, outperforming the broader Zacks Computer and Technology sector's return of 15.5%. AMD stock is overvalued, with a forward 12-month price/sales of 10.41X compared with the broader sector's 6.03X. AMD has a Value Score of F. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for third-quarter 2026 earnings is pegged at $1.90 per share, up a couple of cents over the past 30 days, suggesting 58.33% year-over-year growth. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. price-consensus-chart | Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Quote AMD currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) : Free Stock Analysis Report NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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