AMD executive: The company's key advantage over Nvidia is being more open

AMD stated that in its competition with Nvidia for AI chips, the company has an important advantage: it is more open.

AMD has long promoted this strategy through its open-source ROCm software. ROCm is used to program artificial intelligence chips, and because it’s open source, anyone can use, download, or modify it for free. During Tuesday’s earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su said that ROCm is at a “turning point,” and over the past year, contributions from the open-source community to the project have increased tenfold.

In July, before the earnings announcement, two AMD executives were interviewed by Business Insider, discussing why the company believes that opening certain core software and hardware products can help it surpass competitors such as Nvidia and Qualcomm. In particular, in the AI chip sector, they believe this open strategy is AMD’s major advantage over Nvidia’s CUDA platform, which is widely considered an important moat for Nvidia’s AI chips.

AMD executives said this model has obvious advantages: it allows AMD to tap into the technical capabilities and contributions of thousands of engineers globally at low cost, speeding up software development in the highly competitive AI sector.

“The power of the open-source community is unprecedented,” said Kirk Saban, AMD’s Corporate Vice President of Products, Software, and Solutions. “You can leverage the strength of all these developers, who are effectively doing free development work for us. They contribute code back to our repository, allowing us to harness the best and brightest talent across the whole industry.”

Salil Raje, Senior Vice President of AMD Adaptive and Embedded Computing, said AMD’s latest chips are very well suited for AI agents, one important reason being that developers can continually improve the software through open-source contributions. He described open source as “a core pillar of the company’s strategy.”

“We believe it is extremely important to grow the entire ecosystem together with us. And in the fields of physical AI and robotics, we will adopt the same strategy,” Raje said. “In fact, AI agents are able to perform better on our platform than possibly on competitors’ platforms, and one reason is that our software is now open.”

Chip companies including AMD have recently experienced some fluctuations in the stock market, with a large-scale sell-off at the end of July.

Although the share price rebounded later, AMD still dropped about 9% in after-hours trading Tuesday following its earnings announcement. The company’s quarterly revenue reached $11.5 billion (approximately 77.774 billion RMB at the current exchange rate), beating analysts’ expectations. Capital expenditure jumped nearly threefold year-over-year, reaching $808 million (approximately 5.464 billion RMB at the current exchange rate).

As companies continue to seek more computing resources to support their AI systems, they increasingly view AMD as an alternative to Nvidia. Over the past year, AMD’s share price has risen about 193%, compared to around 20% for Nvidia during the same period.