By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud on Thursday said Google will offer cloud computing services based on AMD’s newest data center chip, a move likely to intensify AMD’s push to grab market share from rival Intel Corp.
Cloud computing providers such as Google, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp are some of the biggest buyers of data center chips. They build services on top of the chips to rent the computing power out to millions of customers.
Google said on Thursday it will start offering services based on AMD’s “Milan” server chip, which AMD released in March. Google said customers such as Snap Inc and Twitter Inc are testing the new AMD-based services.
AMD has been gaining market share against Intel, which was long the dominant player in data center chips but whose offerings have inferior performance on some measures because of years of stumbles in Intel’s manufacturing operations.
Intel in April announced its “Ice Lake” chip competitor to AMD’s “Milan” chip and said all major cloud providers would support it, but Intel has not said when Google will start offering services based on its latest chip.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; editing by Richard Pullin)
