AMD MI350 Price Jumps 66.7% Amid Nvidia Rivalry

According to a recent HSBC research report cited by Korean media Newsis, AMD has increased the price of its Instinct MI350 AI accelerator from $15,000 to $25,000 — a sharp 66.7% jump. AMD believes the MI35's performance can rival Nvidia's Blackwell B200, and despite the price hike, the MI350 remains more affordable than Nvidia's offering.

Launched in June this year, the AMD MI350 series includes two models: MI350X and MI355X. Both are built on AMD's latest CDNA4 architecture, support FP4 and FP6 data formats, and use TSMC's advanced second-generation 3nm (N3P) process. With a staggering 185 billion transistors and integrated 288GB of HBM3e memory boasting an 8 TB/s bandwidth (compared to 6 TB/s in the previous MI325X), these accelerators deliver impressive specs.

AMD claims that the MI350 series delivers four times the AI computing performance and 35 times better inference capabilities than the prior MI300 series. Specifically, the MI355X achieves 10 PFLOPs in Matrix FP6/FP4 computations and 20 PFLOPs when sparsity is applied. The MI350X reaches up to 18.45 PFLOPS in Matrix FP4/FP6 operations. For comparison, Nvidia's B300 (Blackwell Ultra) tops out at 15 PFLOPS in Matrix FP4 performance.

In inference workloads, the MI355X also outperforms Nvidia's B200. For example, in DeepSeek R1 FP4 tasks, the MI355X is 20% faster, and in running the Llama 3.1 405B model, it's 30% faster — matching the performance of Nvidia's GB200.

From a cost-effectiveness standpoint, AMD highlights that the MI355X can generate 40% more tokens than Nvidia's B200 for the same cost.

HSBC's report notes that AMD's pricing move signals strong demand for its AI accelerators and could significantly boost quarterly revenue. HSBC predicts AMD's AI chip sales could far exceed previous estimates of $9.6 billion by 2026, potentially reaching up to $15.1 billion.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers points to the upcoming Q2 earnings report on August 5 as a key event to watch, especially regarding the production ramp-up of the MI355X GPU. Many investors expect the suggested retail price for the MI355X to approach $30,000.

Additionally, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri raised AMD's stock price target from $150 to $210, reaffirming a "buy" rating. Arcuri believes the MI355X price could reach $25,000, higher than earlier forecasts, and expects AMD's data center GPU revenue to hit $10 billion by the end of 2025.

This positive outlook helped AMD shares close at $173.66 on July 28, up 4.32%, marking the highest closing price since July 16, 2024. Year-to-date, AMD's stock has surged 43.77%.