diff --git a/studio/backend/utils/hardware/amd.py b/studio/backend/utils/hardware/amd.py
index 0cf51b4cb6..93daae4605 100644
--- a/studio/backend/utils/hardware/amd.py
+++ b/studio/backend/utils/hardware/amd.py
@@ -67,8 +67,10 @@ def _parse_numeric(value: Any) -> Optional[float]:
 def _parse_memory_mb(value: Any) -> Optional[float]:
     """Parse a memory value from amd-smi output and return MB.
 
-    Handles bare numbers (assumed MB), dict-shaped values with units
-    ({"value": 192, "unit": "GiB"}), and byte-scale heuristic fallback.
+    Handles bare numbers (assumed MB -- the amd-smi convention on every
+    version we have seen), dict-shaped values with explicit units
+    (``{"value": 192, "unit": "GiB"}`` on newer releases), and plain
+    strings like ``"8192 MiB"``.
     """
     unit = ""
     raw_value = value
@@ -98,10 +100,13 @@ def _parse_memory_mb(value: Any) -> Optional[float]:
         # Plain bytes
         return num / (1024 * 1024)
 
-    # No explicit unit -- heuristic: values > 10M are likely bytes
-    if num > 10_000_000:
-        return num / (1024 * 1024)
-    return num  # Assume MB
+    # No explicit unit -- default to MB, which is the amd-smi convention
+    # for bare numeric values. A previous heuristic assumed values above
+    # ~10M were bytes, but that misclassifies small VRAM allocations
+    # (e.g. 5 MB = 5,242,880 reported without a unit) as ~5 TB. Modern
+    # amd-smi always ships explicit units, so the heuristic branch only
+    # fired for legacy output where MB was already the convention.
+    return num
 
 
 def _extract_gpu_metrics(gpu_data: dict) -> dict[str, Any]: