Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD, ETR:AMD) has confirmed that it is shedding 4% of its global workforce as part of its shift towards artificial intelligence applications.
“As a part of aligning our resources with our largest growth opportunities, we are taking a number of targeted steps that will unfortunately result in reducing our global workforce by approximately 4%,” AMD said in a statement published by Bloomberg.
AMD had approximately 26,000 employees globally as of 30 December 2023, according to the company’s annual report, suggesting more than 1,000 employees will lose their jobs.
AMD has made significant strides in catching up to its AI chipmaking superior Nvidia Corp.
Although Santa Clara-based AMD disappointed with its latest quarterly results, its next-generating graphics processing units have garnered significant attention in the tech sector.
The group unveiled its new flagship GPU, the AMD Instinct MI325X accelerator, in October. It is designed specifically for data center and AI applications.
According to AMD, the MI325X supports 1.3 times greater half-precision floating-point (FP16) and 8-bit floating point (FP8) compute performance compared to Nvidia's H200 GPU, making it highly competitive for intensive AI workloads like large language models (LLMs).
AMD’s shares dipped around 2% following news of the headcount reduction.