AMD has confirmed that it’s laying off about four percent of its global workforce, according to reports from TechCrunch and others. It’s not entirely clear how many people will be affected by the move, or what departments the laid-off employees will be drawn from.
We can do some math, though. According to annual filings by AMD, the company had about 26,000 employees last year. Four percent of 26,000 equates to about 1,000 people. That’s a lot.
So that tells us why. You already know the answer. This is a bunch of corporate nonsense. “As part of aligning our resources with our biggest growth opportunities, we are taking a number of targeted steps,” an AMD spokesperson told CRN.
Don’t worry. The company also said it is “committed to treating impacted employees with respect and helping them during this transition.” Engadget reached out to AMD for more details on what that respect and help will be like. We’ll update this story if we find out anything.
This news comes after a fairly mixed Q3 earnings report. According to Wccftech, the company grew revenue and profit, but the gaming division saw a massive 69 percent drop year-over-year. The company has also struggled to compete with NVIDIA in the world of AI chips.
Experts still predict that AMD will earn around $33 billion in 2025, thanks to its upcoming next-generation GPUs. That’s not enough for investors, though, as that’s “only” an increase of around $7 billion compared to 2024. The company’s stock is down around four percent this year, and fell even more today. Capitalism demands massive and endless growth.
Rival (and sometimes best friend) Intel has faced similar challenges. The company announced more than 15,000 layoffs earlier this year.
AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chips came as a huge surprise at CES 2025. They’re basically super-powered versions of the company’s Ryzen AI hardware, with up to 16 CPU cores and 50 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, plus up to 128GB of integrated RAM. AMD claims the Ryzen AI Max chips will deliver up to 2.6 times faster 3D rendering than Intel’s Core Ultra 9 288V, as well as up to 1.4 times better graphics performance.
Looking a little closer, you might think AMD was taking a little inspiration from Apple Silicon with its powerful CPU cores, graphics, and integrated memory. But according to VP Joe Macri, AMD was working in this direction long before Apple.
“We were building APUs [chips that combine CPUs and Radeon graphics] when Apple was using discrete GPUs. They were using our discrete GPUs. So I don’t give Apple credit for coming up with this idea.” AMD also had experience stuffing too much memory into its Instinct data center GPUs.
Still, Macri credits Apple with proving that you don’t need discrete graphics to sell people powerful computers. “Many people in the PC industry said, well, if you want graphics, it has to be discrete graphics because otherwise people will think it’s bad graphics,” he said. “Apple showed that consumers don’t care about what’s inside the box. They really care about what the box looks like. They care about the screen, the keyboard, the mouse. They care about what it does.”