It’s no secret that gaming hardware has been getting more expensive this year, so it shouldn’t be surprising that people are buying less of it. But, it turns out that AMD’s gaming business shrank by a whopping 31% in Q2 2026.
In the second quarter of the year, the gaming business only made $779 million, compared to $1.1 billion in Q2 2025, according to the company’s latest earnings report. AMD attributes this loss to “lower semi-custom revenue,” which means fewer consoles have been selling over the last few months. This is in a time that would have included the Steam Machine and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE in June 2026.
AMD’s gaming revenue is lumped into the Client and Gaming segment, and overall, that portion of the business was up 6% year over year, making $3.8 billion. AMD’s processors have been making their way into more modern laptops, especially in the budget range, and while the company’s earnings report doesn’t lay out exactly which products were selling, it’s not hard to imagine that a lot of this growth came at the hands of budget laptops that don’t have a ton of RAM.
But while the gaming business isn’t doing all that great, AMD is thriving. The company raked in $11.5 billion in revenue last quarter, which is up 51% over this time last year, driven largely by AI. AMD’s data center business brought in $6.7 billion last quarter, which is a massive 107% increase over last year. So, even though hardware is more expensive and harder to even obtain, AMD is bringing in more money than ever before.
It’s likely that the gaming business will continue to shrink over the next year or so, while AMD cashes in on the AI boom. Especially now that the Xbox Series X officially went up in price and both Team Green and Team Red reportedly plan to raise prices on gaming hardware, it really does seem like gaming hardware is going to continue to fall down the list of AMD and Nvidia’s priorities.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
