This article was originally published in the Brand Finance US 500 2024 Report
AMD has undergone a remarkable brand transformation, evolving from its PC and gaming roots to become a pioneering leader in enterprise computing and AI infrastructure. In this interview with Brand Finance, John Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer at AMD, discusses the key milestones and strategies that have propelled the brand's growth.
Interview with John Taylor
AMD
What would you consider as the defining moments or milestones in building and strengthening the AMD brand?
In my time as CMO, we’ve methodically transformed the AMD brand from its PC and gaming legacy, first by expanding to enterprise and embedded computing leadership, and now evolving into the end-to-end AI infrastructure leader. There have been many defining moments on that path, collectively accruing to AMD in making it one of the most valuable and fastest growing brands in the world. The acquisition of Xilinx brought a number one position in a wide range of embedded markets from 5G communications to automotive and more, while adding a scalable AI inference engine to our product portfolio. We introduced our brand platform “together we advance” shortly after the acquisition, enabling us to tell those much broader market stories of how AMD powers everything from cloud computing for billions of people, to real-time medical imaging and robotic surgery, to the world’s fastest supercomputers, and of course PCs and game consoles. But I really think 2023 stands apart for how we elevated our brand to be synonymous with powering AI, starting with the coveted CES opening keynote where we expressed our vision for the computing that makes AI possible and launched the first AI PCs. And we bookended the year with our “Advancing AI” event, where we showcased generative AI leadership through the voices of many new AI customers deploying AMD at scale. In truth, we’ve only just begun this AI brand journey and I’m incredibly excited.
As the demand for AI increases and you further position the AMD brand as an AI leader, how are you thinking about the importance of the progress you’re making in energy efficiency to combat the world’s climate challenges?
As datacenters and compute-intensive industries adopt AI at scale beyond their existing I.T. priorities, energy demand grows with it. Energy and physical data center space constraints as well as the broader implications of increased energy usage are a real challenge that CIOs, enterprise buyers, and IT decision makers are thinking seriously about. AMD addresses this by driving product innovation with intent to make a major impact on increased energy efficiency. For example, AMD EPYC CPUs power one-third of the world’s server market and growing by delivering leadership performance and performance-per-watt, which enables a significant consolidation of data centers – fewer racks needed to do the same work at lower power. This same mindset drives our AMD Instinct AI accelerator products, where we deliver the ability to run more AI models per server system, or larger models in a single server. We also have aggressive goals to improve the energy efficiency of our chips with “30x25”, or a 30x energy efficiency improvement for accelerated data center compute nodes by 2025 from a 2020 baseline. With our latest datacenter AI chips, the AMD Instinct MI300 Series Accelerators, we’ve achieved a 13.5x improvement from the 2020 baseline. It’s incredibly important to us not only to do our part in holistically designing our chips for energy efficiency, but to also offer our customers a brand they can be confident will continue to deliver efficient and performant products each generation.
Looking ahead, what future plans and strategies does AMD have in place to further strengthen its brand and continue the growth of its brand value?
As AMD has grown, we shifted our marketing approach from product-first to audience centric and brand-first. We’ve become very intentional about our engagement with specific audiences, focusing beyond our product brands toward the AMD brand and how we can show up as the trusted computing partner to our customers. We aim to be a trusted leader in enterprise AI, which means elevating our brand and finding new ways to speak directly to and build trust with CIOs, enterprise buyers and IT decision makers. We’re continuing to embrace this approach as we've scaled our “together we advance” brand campaign, working together with our industry partners and customers to advance the many markets we serve and build on that trust along the way.
