AMD CEO Lisa Su Predicts 2026 is the True Year of AI Inference
AMD CEO Lisa Su announced during the Open Compute Project Global Summit that 2026 will be the true 'Year of AI Inference' and projected that the CPU market will surpass $200 billion by 2030. This shift highlights the industry's transition from training AI models to executing real-time inference and handling complex agentic AI workloads, driving massive structural demand for high-performance CPUs. Su noted that inference will capture about 60% of the market share and revealed that AMD began shipping its Helios production system to major enterprise customers in September.
## BACKGROUND
AI inference is the operational phase where a trained artificial intelligence model processes new inputs in real time to generate predictions or decisions. Agentic AI refers to semi- or fully autonomous systems capable of executing multi-turn workflows, calling external tools, and maintaining extended context over time.