AMD is competing with Nvidia with its rack-scale Helios AI system

Chipmaker AMD is targeting rival Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a large-scale system designed to meet the computing needs of the world’s largest artificial intelligence labs.

At the company’s Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su touted a new AI rack system known as Helios — along with its growing list of customers, including Microsoft — as the company prepares to ship it later this year. Su also presented the company’s latest chipset designed to feed the computing-hungry dragon that is the artificial intelligence industry.

Rack systems combine several processors into a single high-power unit. They’re designed for data centers, where you train and run AI models and other compute-intensive workloads.

Su described Helios as the technology industry’s “highest-performing AI rack,” adding that it is “designed to train and run the world’s most demanding frontier models at scale.” The system will be deployed by leading AI companies on a gigawatt scale, the company said.

Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its high-volume Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems. AMD is clearly looking forward to getting in on the action. Helios’ performance metrics appear to give it a real chance, beating Vera Rubin on a number of metrics, The Register reported.

Helios, which was unveiled 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 deploy the system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Monday that the company will expand its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Meanwhile, Anthropic and AMD announced a strategic partnership on Wednesday to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of GPUs across the new rack system.

AMD on Thursday also introduced the Venice-X CPU, designed for data centers and to handle high computing workloads. Venice-X is expected to be launched in 2027.

During her remarks, Su commented on the trajectory of the chip industry, claiming that by 2030, AI-enabled chips will become a large part of the overall computing market. That’s because the industry is “experiencing a sea change in demand for computing” driven largely by the emergence of agentic AI, she said.

“When you ask an agent to do something, it actually has dozens of steps, it has to think, it has to call tools, it has to access data, it has to keep doing it over and over again until it solves the problem, and so you need a lot of GPUs to do all that,” the executive said.

“We now expect that by 2030, the AI ​​accelerator market will reach about $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 this market because algorithms are still in their infancy, and we continue to see workloads change, and this favors programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem,” she added.