bl interview. Generative AI models to drive demand for high-performance computing, datacentres: Forrest Norrod of AMD

In the first half of this year, we are seeing some conservatism in the enterprise segment. We are seeing a drawdown in inventory because of the inventory build-ups in the preceding years in the cloud market. However, overall, we expect AMD’s datacentre share to certainly grow this year. We are also optimistic about its long-term prospects.

With respect to the Indian market, the segment is extremely important for us. We have witnessed strong growth in the last two years. We are currently in the mid-twenties with respect to market share of datacentre CPUs in India. It is about double from a year ago. Regardless of what happens in India or across the globe, we believe we are expecting a strong because of the strength of the product portfolio. We are very bullish on our ability to gain share both in India as well in other countries.

I think, we are still unclear whether we are going to have a recession worldwide. But businesses are being conservative in their spending. So, we definitely see a slowdown in commitments to new projects. But again, at AMD, we have diversified our businesses to tide over such times. Today, we offer a differentiated product portfolio with substantial better efficiency and performance than our competitors.

And we believe our growth story is intact despite headwinds in the market.

Due to Covid-induced disruptions to supply chains, everyone got so concerned about the continuity of supply and they stocked up. And I think those are all now coming out. So, while I see some conservatism in the market in the first half of the year, this is a transient phenomenon. This year is going to be a story of two halves.

I certainly believe that digitisation will drive the growth of datacentre business. Companies are going to look at datacentre as a competitive advantage for a long time to come. If, over the last 10 years, companies updated their IT systems to take full advantage of the Internet, then I believe the next big secular trend to revolutionise datacentre segment is AI. In my view, AI is going to drive disruptions and improvements across industries. There will be enormous demand for increased computing power to directly support those AI systems and indirectly support the increasing velocity that we think is going to flow from AI-led applications and transformations in business processes.

We are just entering another massive secular growth cycle for computing demand. And this is a very good thing for companies like us.

AI capabilities are growing rapidly. We have been focused on incorporating AI technology into our products to provide pervasive, high-performance power-efficient AI across our entire portfolio.

People are becoming aware of what large language models and generative AI models can do. ChatGPT is the recent most obvious example. This will have a tremendous impact across a wide range of knowledge sets. Tasks that previously nobody thought computers could do, will get automated. We are going to see an explosion of very large generative models that are domain specific. Think about ChatGPT and its different versions that can do a much deeper analysis, be more accurate, and much more powerful and can perform tasks specific to sectors such as law, real estate or engineering.

We are going to see an explosion in productivity across industries over the next three to four years due to these generative models. And it’s going to require enormous computing capacity to do—both to train the models as well as to use them to run the inference.

Yes. We are very focused on providing leading HPC and adaptive computing solutions. We are uniquely positioned to lead because we have world-class server CPUs that have demonstrated multigenerational performance leadership against the competition. We also have extremely capable GPUs that compete directly with our competition in the space.

We are already a leader in traditional high-performance computing. The most powerful supercomputers in the world use AMD GPUs. And we have been building a multiyear roadmap. This year at CES we announced Instinct MI300 Exascale APU which we believe will give leadership performance in AI.

MI200 already offered leadership performance in HPC and a very competitive performance in AI. With MI200, We did a lot of work with key customers to build the software ecosystem around the AI product portfolio.

With MI300, we will take that to the next level. The software ecosystem will be built such that the largest users of generative models have a better choice with them.

For the inference, we are building innovative inference engines. After the acquisition, Xilinx and AMD teams are jointly working to put inference capability into virtually every chip we design—all the way from client systems for consumer PCs to datacentres for industrial applications because we think inference is required at every point.

India is critical to us for two reasons. First, from a market perspective, we believe India is a very important datacentre market. When we think about high-growth markets, we believe India’s datacentre market is going to grow substantially, more than some of its peers. We expect the growth rate to be higher here because of various trends, including digitisation. Then there are the geopolitical and demographic realities. We think the India market is poised to grow stronger.

But more importantly, India is a critical region for us because of our workforce in the country. A quarter of the AMDers, over 6,000 of our engineers, are here in India. And these engineers help develop almost every product that we design. Over half of our networking engineers are in India. And networking is an increasingly important part of our datacentre business.

The team that assembles all of our server chips is based in India. Our Server CPUs contain IPs built around the world, but we put them together and we make the chip a reality here in India.

Absolutely. Our new new line of CPUs, especially for Edge applications, is coming up. Siena processor is specifically designed for Edge and industrial applications. And our partners such as Lenovo, Dell and others are building innovative Edge products around this new processor line.

India is very attractive for international companies to invest in because of a favourable business environment. I also think India is also being thoughtful and innovative. For instance, the idea to have data embassies that will function like embassies with a different set of regulatory regimes within these datacentre space is a very innovative idea. I think this move will go a long way towards making India uniquely attractive to companies around the world.

It is a new concept and quite candidly, we are trying to understand the concept and its implications. As I mentioned a moment ago, we are very much intrigued by the idea. And I think that it could be a unique differentiator for India because you are going to divorce from regulatory constraints.

One likes to build a data centre at a place that is most efficient for business, has access to good talent pool to run the data centre and to continuously optimise it.

Then, there’s a second deciding factor that is growing in importance across the world. It is around data sovereignty and data privacy. In this context, the idea of data embassies is a powerful one. You can address the regulatory constraints without constraining operational efficiencies. We will continue to look at it further.

As I said earlier, it’s a relatively new concept for us as well. I am certainly not the expert and so I don’t want to characterise the differences in detail, because I will probably misspeak.

My general understanding of the proposal is that it will allow adherence to regulatory guidelines of different countries within an India-located data centre. Beyond that, I don’t want to characterise it, because I am not the expert.

By the end of 2022 (Q4 2022), we were the largest business within AMD constituting just over a quarter of the total revenues of the company.   

We do not provide that level of geographic detail. But the contribution of India data centre is significant and it is growing.