AMD calls on IT leaders to re-think AI infrastructure planning: Agentic AI is not just adding more CPUs to a box of GPUs

CPU demand is now forecast to more than double, as AI shifts from GPU heavy systems to ones that are more balanced. The focus of the discussion looks to be the CPU:GPU ratio moving from 1:8 or 1:4 to 1:1 or >1:1, and therefore, more CPUs are needed. AMD is saying that people are getting the system and infrastructure planning for agentic AI wrong. Many people including IT professionals think that all they have to do is to add more CPUs to their GPU dense server racks, more CPU per blade, or more CPU blades on the same racks. The reality is that these CPUs in the GPU dense racks serve as head nodes that handle the scheduling and I/O - They do not serve the agentic purposes. The newly introduced workloads such as orchestration, agent control and security are a separate class of workloads that have to be run on agentic CPU-only racks that run as a new layer that is just as large as the GPU inference, similar to a distributed system. IT planners will have to plan for more CPU capacity as the infrastructure equation changes up. https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2026/agentic-ai-changes-the-cpu-gpu-equation.html