American semiconductor major Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Monday briefly soared past USD 1 trillion in market capitalisation, joining a small group of chipmakers to reach the milestone, as investors bet on its expanding role in AI computing, despite the growing calls from frontier research labs to slow down product R&D to make the technology safe and ethical.
The milestone, even though it got registered for a brief period, would provide a massive boost for the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker, often regarded as the closest rival to Nvidia for graphics processing units (GPUs).
AMD became the fourth US chipmaker to top a USD 1 trillion valuation, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.
Nvidia crossed the mark in 2023 and is now the world’s most valuable company, worth more than USD 5 trillion.
AMD has accelerated its AI product launches and transformed its business model from selling individual chips to offering complete systems that combine processors, networking gear and related hardware, helping it compete with Nvidia’s products.
The company is also benefiting from rising demand for central processing units used alongside graphics processors in servers handling inference. That has helped AMD capture a substantial amount of market share from Intel.
In August, AMD forecasted quarterly revenue above Wall Street estimates, which fell short of lofty investor expectations, sending its stock down over 7% on the day.
However, the company staged a tremendous market rebound since then, leaping over 26%.
AMD has also finalised the acquisition of the Toronto-based chip startup Taalas.
Taalas develops specialised silicon designed to reduce computing and memory bottlenecks in AI inference, the process that involves running trained AI models to generate responses or predictions.
Specialised inference chips have become a critical focus for semiconductor makers, with AI shifting from training to real-time, high-volume deployment, while looking to cut computing costs by a significant margin.
Nvidia, in March, unveiled a new central processor and AI system built on technology from Groq, a chip startup specialising in inference.
AMD plans to integrate Taalas’ technology into its accelerator roadmap and develop system-level solutions using AMD Instinct graphics processing units (GPUs).
Taalas, established in 2023, gained attention in February by securing USD 169 million to fund its R&D initiatives. The successful round brought the company’s total funding to around USD 219 million.
AMD has been making steady yet strategic acquisitions to solidify its AI division.
In November 2025, the company bought MK1, an AI software startup specialising in high-speed inference.
In 2026, the company purchased MEXT to expand its AI portfolio in June and, in July, added FastFlowLM to its Artificial Intelligence Group.