AMD hits $1 trillion market cap as AI agents boost CPU demand

AMD $AMD has crossed into the trillion-dollar market cap club as the rise of personal AI agents fuels a surge in demand for central processing units, giving the company and rival Intel $INTC new momentum in a chip market long dominated by Nvidia $NVDA's graphics processors.

Both Meta $META's Muse and OpenAI's Dots — two of the most prominent personal AI agents on the market — run on AMD EPYC-branded CPUs, according to CNBC. When asked, Muse confirms it operates on AMD hardware, while Dots disclosed that its underlying virtual machine is driven by an AMD EPYC 9V74 processor. AMD currently holds about 46% of the x86 CPU market, according to Mercury Research data cited by CNBC.

AMD stock has gained 32% over the past month and Intel 21%, a run that has outpaced every one of tech's megacap companies. AMD's data center revenue nearly 60% of total sales in the quarter ended June, having surged to $6.7 billion — more than twice what the division generated a year earlier.

The agents driving CPU demand operate differently from traditional AI applications. While GPUs remain essential for inference, the agents themselves need a dedicated CPU to sustain the long-running workflows they execute — sometimes for hours or days at a stretch — Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman told CNBC. "CPUs are actually performing the workflows while GPUs are doing the thinking," Newman said.