AMD a Timeline
AMD began in 1969 as eight men from Fairchild Semiconductor with a living room for an office. In September 2026 it was worth more than a trillion dollars. This video follows the whole story, in order, with every date and figure on screen.
How AMD grew by making other firms' chips as a licensed second source, and how IBM's PC made it Intel's partner in February 1982. How Intel shut AMD out of the 386, and how eight years of arbitration and court cases ended in the settlement of 11 January 1995. NexGen and the K6, and the Athlon that shipped at one gigahertz on 6 March 2000, two days before Intel's. AMD64, the 64-bit extension to x86 that Opteron launched on 22 April 2003 and Intel adopted in 2004.
Then the fall: the $5.4 billion purchase of ATI in 2006, the write-downs and the losses of 2007 and 2008, the factories split off as GlobalFoundries in 2009, the European Commission's fine on Intel and Intel's $1.25 billion settlement with AMD, and the Bulldozer years. Lisa Su became chief executive on 8 October 2014; in July 2015 the shares closed at $1.62. Zen, Ryzen (2 March 2017) and EPYC; chiplets made by TSMC; Frontier, the first exascale supercomputer (May 2022).
And the AI turn: Xilinx, the Instinct MI300X, ZT Systems, and the gigawatt agreements with OpenAI (6 GW, October 2025), Meta (6 GW, February 2026) and Anthropic (up to 2 GW, July 2026). Revenue of $34.6 billion in 2025 and $11.5 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and a market value above $1 trillion on 21 September 2026. Finally the risks: Nvidia, dependence on TSMC in Taiwan, and a few very large customers.
Disclosure: this video was written with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, one of the companies discussed. No figure appears without its date and source.
Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.
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Sources and credits
Primary sources
- Computer History Museum, David Laws, 'It's a Good Year for Asparagus', 1 May 2019 - eight Fairchild founders; Sanders's 'five million minutes' quote.
- California Supreme Court, Advanced Micro Devices v. Intel, decided 30 December 1994 - 1976 licence, February 1982 agreement, April 1987 arbitration, Am386 March 1991.
- UPI, 30 October 1992 - $15.3M award; Sanders's 'drop-kicked' quote.
- AMD Form 8-K filed 19 January 1995 - settlement of 11 January 1995.
- AMD Form 8-K filed 31 January 1996 - NexGen merger; AMD K6 launch release, 2 April 1997; AMD release, 6 March 2000; Intel release, 8 March 2000.
- The Register, 22 April 2003 (Opteron); InfoWorld, 17 February 2004 (Intel follows AMD64).
- Engadget, 24 July 2006; AMD release, 25 October 2006 (ATI); AMD results, 17 January 2008 and 22 January 2009.
- The Register, 25 February 1999 ('only real men have fabs'); AMD Q1 2009 release, 21 April 2009 (GlobalFoundries); European Commission MEMO/09/235, 13 May 2009; Intel release, 12 November 2009; AMD release, 4 March 2012; Cleary Antitrust Watch, December 2025; Courthouse News, 10 December 2025.
- AMD release, 8 October 2014 (Lisa Su); Motley Fool, 8 December 2022 ($3.28); StatMuse Money ($1.62, 27 July 2015); TIME, 10 December 2024; PCWorld, 22 February 2017.
- AMD releases, 22 February and 20 June 2017, 7 August 2019; IEEE Spectrum, 28 August 2018; Microway, 7 August 2019; TOP500, 30 May 2022 and November 2024.
- AMD 8-K, 27 October 2020 and 14 February 2022 (Xilinx); TechSpot, 16 February 2022; AMD release, 6 December 2023 (MI300X); AMD Q4 2024 results, 4 February 2025; AMD 8-Ks, 19 August 2024 and 31 March 2025 (ZT Systems); Sanmina, 27 October 2025.
- AMD 8-K, 6 October 2025 (OpenAI); AMD releases, 24 February 2026 (Meta) and 22 July 2026 (Anthropic); AMD results, 3 February 2026 and 4 August 2026.
- Investopedia, 21 September 2026; Bloomberg (Carmen Reinicke), 21 September 2026.
Not regulated financial advice.