AMD downplays DeepSeek threat: '[Innovation is] good for AI adoption'

While markets respond to the shift in demand created by Chinese AI company DeepSeek, AMD's CEO Lisa Su provided some comments on the state of hardware sales moving forward.

"Relative to DeepSeek, we think that innovation on the models and the algorithms is good for AI adoption," she told analysts during Tuesday's Q4 earnings call.

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Su welcomes the innovation, going on to state that she expects to see more AI compute deployment within the broader market.

"The fact that there are new ways to bring about training and inference capabilities with less infrastructure is actually good,"

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Fears are still lingering within the tech sector, with power, semiconductor and infrastructure companies exposed to a collective $1 trillion loss in market valuation as of last Tuesday. NVIDIA suffered the most from this crash, famously losing $600 billion in market valuation and 17% in stock price over a single day.

AMD, however, has been somewhat resistant to the crash due to its relatively minor involvement in the AI sector. Since the DeepSeek R1 model launched on January 20th, AMD's stock price has decreased by just 2.3%, while NVIDIA is still down by approximately 15%.

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Su also anticipates that AMD's next-gen Instinct accelerators will drive billions of dollars in annual revenue over the coming years, despite the speculation that less computing power will be required to produce next-gen AI models. Su was resistant to committing to a specific revenue figure for the accelerators.

AMD's CEO is not the only major tech company to praise DeepSeek recently, with the chiefs of Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google each issuing statements in favor of the innovation. The common sentiment is that lowering the cost of artificial intelligence will be a net positive for the industry, with AI adoption only expected to increase.

"First of all, I think, tremendous team," Google's Sundar Pichai said of DeepSeek. "I think they've done very, very good work."

Even as AI hardware giants suffer historic losses, top executives from AMD to Google are praising DeepSeek's efficiency as a positive shift for the industry. Whether this optimism will translate into long-term gains remains the burning question.