Chipmaker AMD is taking aim at rival Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a rack-scale system designed to handle 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 Chairman and CEO Dr. Lisa Su unveiled a new artificial intelligence system known as Helios with a growing list of customers, including Microsoft, as the company prepares to ship it later this year. Su also unveiled the company’s newest chips, designed to feed the computing-hungry dragon that is the AI industry.
Rack systems integrate multiple processors single high power unit. They are built 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 rack,” adding that it is “built to develop and run the world’s most demanding frontier models at scale.” The system will be deployed by leading artificial intelligence companies on a gigawatt scale, the company said.
Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its advantages Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems. AMD clearly wants to act. And Helios’ performance figures give it a real chance, outperforming Vera Ruby in a number of metrics, The Register reported on this.
Helios, which first appeared in 2025, and performed on stage At CES 2026 in January, it already has several well-known customers including OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Anthropic and Microsoft. have plans to deploy system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella he said on Monday the company will expand its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Meanwhile, Anthropic and AMD announced a strategic partnership Wednesday to accommodate up to two gigawatts of GPUs through a new rack system.
AMD also presented Thursday, the Venice-X CPU, designed for data centers and to handle high-computing workloads. Venice-X is expected to be launched in 2027.
During his remarks, Su commented on the trajectory of the chip industry, claiming that by 2030, AI-powered chips will become a large part of the overall computing market. That’s because the industry is “seeing a step change in computing demand,” driven largely by the rise of agent AI.
“When you ask an agent to do something, it actually has dozens of steps, and it has to think, call tools, access data, and keep doing that over and over again until it solves the problem, and so it takes a lot of GPUs to do all that,” the executive said.
“We now expect the market for AI accelerators to reach about $1.4 trillion by 2030,” Su said. “This means 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 this market because the algorithms are still very much in their infancy and we continue to see workloads change, favoring programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem,” he said.
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