Chipmaker AMD is taking aim at competitor Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a rack-scale system designed to meet the computing needs of the world’s largest artificial intelligence labs.
At the company’s sold-out Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su promoted the new AI rack system known as Helios, along with its growing list of customers, including Microsoft, as the company prepares to launch it later this year. Su also unveiled the company’s newest chips that are designed to feed the computing-hungry dragon that is the artificial intelligence industry.
Rack systems combine many processors in one single high power unit. They are designed for data centers, where they train and run AI models and other compute-intensive workloads.
Su called Helios the tech industry’s “highest-performing AI framework,” adding that it was “built to train and run the world’s most demanding frontier models at massive scale.” The system will be deployed by leading gigawatt-scale AI companies, the company said.
Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell Rack scale systems. AMD is clearly looking to get in on the action. And Helios’ performance metrics seem to give it a real chance, beating Vera Rubin by several metrics. The Registry reported.
Helios, which was revealed in 2025 and shown on stage in January at CES 2026, already has several well-known customers, including OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Anthropic and Microsoft, all of which have plans to implement the system. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said Monday that the company would expand its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Meanwhile, Anthropic and AMD announced a strategic partnership Wednesday to deploy up to two gigawatts of GPUs across the new rack system.
amd also introduced On Thursday it unveiled its Venice-X CPU, which is designed for data centers and to handle high computing workloads. The Venice-X is expected to launch in 2027.
During his remarks, Su commented on the trajectory of the chip industry, stating that by 2030, chips that power AI will become a huge part of the overall computing market. This is because the industry is “seeing a step change in computing demand” driven largely by the rise of agent AI, he said.
“When you ask the agent to do something, it actually has dozens of steps, and it has to reason, it has to call tools, it has to access data, and it has to keep doing it over and over again until it solves the problem, so it takes a lot of GPUs to do all that,” the executive said.
“We now expect that by 2030, the AI accelerator market will reach around $1.4 trillion,” Su said. “What that means is that by the end of the decade, the AI accelerator market will approach the size of the entire semiconductor market today.”
“We expect GPUs to make up the vast majority of that market because algorithms are still in their infancy and we continue to see changes in workloads, and that favors programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem,” he added.
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