At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in "open" mentions and a ramp that's been building each year at the AMD events.

In a distant second place for the most heard term after AI was likely "open" (source) at this year's event. And at least for me, a soothing word that does not get tiring to hear but still gratifying after all these years... Especially long ago the continued pressure and lobbying for more open-source software efforts from AMD and ATI.

"Our model at AMD is really on openness," noted one of the AMD executives. "Accelerating open innovation" was another one of the frequent phrases in AMD presentations.

Beyond their well known open-source efforts from their AMD Linux graphics driver stack to AMD ROCm to their other open-source drivers and more, even "open hardware" was promoted at AMD Advancing AI 2026. AMD's new Kria AI Software Development Platform is being promoted for openness with open hardware schematics and the AMD Robotics Software Suite also announced this week as open-source. In addition to schematics, the RTL for the FPGA on the robotics developer kit is also being open-sourced. Their new AMD Robotics Partner Network is also being promoted as their newest open-source ecosystem.

Another interesting open-source anecdote from this year's AAI event is that for the AMD Helios networking they are building the software stack off SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud). OpenBMC also continues to play a role on the new AMD EPYC 9006 Venice server platforms. OpenSIL is also reaching production status on Zen 6 for open-source CPU silicon initialization.

And a whole lot more. So while some may cringe at hearing the overabundance of "AI" mentions, at least "open" from open standards to open-source software and hardware was very prominent to hear at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event with AMD continuing to heavily embrace open standards/software/ecosystems. It was also a very different vibe from the open-source comments at last year's Intel event.