AMD has had its best quarter yet, as the chipmaker reported record revenue of $11.5bn for the second quarter, up 50% on a year earlier, as demand for AI hardware kept climbing. Chief executive Lisa Su called it an excellent quarter and said AI was driving compute demand across every market. The rest of the business was mixed, with client chips up 23% and embedded up 19%, while gaming slid 31%. Nvidia’s dominance has never rested on silicon alone, and its real moat is CUDA, the software layer that a generation of AI developers learned first and rarely leaves. AMD is closing distance on the hardware while betting the war is won in software, and that bet will take more than one blockbuster quarter to settle.