AMD is operating a private cloud that makes key EDA (electronic design applications) accessible to engineers worldwide. The company's engineering tasks are executed in real time across a virtual grid of servers that has 120,000 CPU cores. AMD tries to maintain close to a 100 percent utilization rate, and virtualization tools help all cores seem like one "giant number-crunching machine," Dana said.

"We want to do compute anywhere -- it doesn't matter where the engineer sits as long as they get the performance they need," Dana said.

Putting applications in the cloud consolidates computing resources and centralizes the computing infrastructure, Dana said. Data is more secure because it is stored in fewer, centralized locations.

Many companies offer cloud services, such as Amazon, but AMD kept an internal cloud as it wanted to have stronger control over usage of EDA tools. The company has deployed specific tools to track down where resources need to be assigned, and cloud transactions change by region as employees worldwide have been assigned different tasks, Dana said.

"It's not cost-effective to do it externally," Dana said.