AMD launches Helios, its first rack AI system to rival Nvidia, adding Microsoft as newest buyer
AMD announced the launch of Helios, its first rack-scale AI system, positioning it as a direct competitor to Nvidia's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems. Microsoft has joined Meta, OpenAI, and Oracle as early customers, with Microsoft planning to deploy Helios in Azure data centers for frontier model inference and Azure AI services. The system will ship later this year. AMD also revealed that Microsoft will add two new computing instances powered by AMD's 'Venice' CPUs for agentic AI and semiconductor design. The announcement marks AMD's most aggressive move yet to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, with eight of the top ten AI companies already using AMD Instinct GPUs. Financial terms and compute capacity details were not disclosed.
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