AMD stock surges as agentic AI shifts workloads from GPUs to CPUs, powering Meta's Muse and Dots

Split a 192-core EPYC evenly and, before any overhead, it would host about 96 Muse sessions or about 21 Dots sessions ^[18]. Dots asks for 4.5 times the cores Muse does ^[19]. Both companies carve servers into virtual machines so that one box serves scores of users ^[13].

The CPU cost per agent is small, or rather small per hour. Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman explained that each agent needs a computer of its own, one that can keep going in the background for hours or even days ^[9]. An agent left running for a day holds its cores for the whole day, so demand scales with sessions multiplied by duration ^[9]. The CNBC report does not give user counts or session lengths for either agent.

"As more agents are created and developed, and more people start to use them for more tasks, it's going to start to shift the workload away from GPUs and onto CPUs," said Ryan Shrout, president of Signal65, which consults on AI hardware and costs ^[23]. Newman put it differently. "CPUs are actually performing the workflows while GPUs are doing the thinking," he said ^[10].

One outcome is that agents add CPU demand on top of GPU demand, lifting AMD and Intel without costing Nvidia a sale. Another is that cloud providers move agent virtual machines onto their own Arm-based chips, which nearly every major one is developing ^[14]. The third is that Nvidia's Vera, a CPU it says it built for agents and sells in a CPU-only rack, takes the sockets ^[8]. Of Vera, Mizuho Securities analyst Jordan Klein said, "It's just a new product and they're going to be competing against a lot of different players," adding that AMD currently has the "best product" ^[16]. I think the evidence fits the first outcome best, because Newman's account has the GPU still doing the inference for every session ^[10]. The counter-case is Shrout's. If agent work does move off GPUs, a re-rating of AMD and Intel against Nvidia is earned.

Meta's own statement limits what AMD can count on. "We take a diverse approach to our hardware and are largely CPU-agnostic by design, which gives us the most flexibility in acquiring capacity," a Meta spokesperson said ^[5]. OpenAI also buys from several CPU providers ^[6].

AMD's June-quarter data center figure implies total quarterly revenue above about $11.2 billion ^[15] and a year-earlier data center line below $3.35 billion ^[17]. Annualized, the whole data center business, GPUs included, runs near $26.8 billion, about 13% of the $200 billion CPU market Nvidia forecasts for 2030 ^[21]. The report does not break out CPU sales within that line, and for Intel it gives only the share move ^[1]. "The conversation has changed quite a bit over the last eight to 10 months in terms of agentic usage," said Dan McNamara, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of compute and enterprise AI, who added that CPU sales are going to "really ramp" ^[22].