Menu Home News Hardware Gaming Mobile Finance Deals Reviews How To Wccftech FinanceSemiconductor AMD Thinks Each ZT Systems Engineer Is Worth $1.33 Million Rohail Saleem • May 20, 2025 at 10:21am EDT This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy. AMD's latest divestment is attracting quite a lot of eyeballs on Wall Street, especially as the transaction will serve to enrich the chipmaker's proverbial coffers, while allowing for a more nimble and lean operational structure, where AMD will design its rack-scale solutions in-house and then outsource their manufacturing to Sanmina. As we detailed in a recent post, Sanmina will pay AMD $2.25 billion in cash, and a $300 million premium equally divided between cash and equity ($150 million each). Additionally, Sanmina will also make a contingent payment of $450 million to the chipmaker, based on the financial performance of the acquired assets over the next three years. This transaction is expected to achieve closure by the end of 2025. Now, Citi has added some additional color by delving into the minutiae of the definitive agreement between AMD and Sanmina. As such, AMD stands to gain $3 billion from the divestment of ZT Systems' data center infrastructure and manufacturing business to Sanmina. However, Citi analyst Christopher Danely points out that AMD had recently acquired the entirety of ZT Systems for $4.6 billion. This means that AMD is valuing ZT's residual assets, which primarily consist of a team of around 1,200 engineers, at $1.6 billion. This equates to a valuation of around $1.33 million per engineer. Meanwhile, Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers thinks that AMD is increasingly pivoting towards its upcoming rack-scale offerings to drive the next phase of growth. The MI400 series of GPUs, expected to debut in 2026, currently personify AMD's rack-scale ambitions. Rakers quotes recent industry reports to suggest that the MI450 IF128 cluster will consist of "128x GPU packages communicating at >1.8TB/s unidirectional bandwidth per GPU." Of course, we'll likely hear more about AMD's rack-scale strategy at its upcoming AI event in June. Finally, we note that AMD is also working with HUMAIN, the AI-focused subsidiary of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity in Saudi Arabia over the next five years. Subscribe to get an everyday digest of the latest technology news in your inbox Follow us on Topics Sections Company Some posts on wccftech.com may contain affiliate links. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com © 2025 WCCF TECH INC. 700 - 401 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada