Chipmaker AMD has unveiled its latest hardware, a rack-scale system engineered to meet the intensive computing demands of the world's largest AI laboratories, positioning itself as a direct challenger to competitor Nvidia.
During the company's sold-out Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su showcased the new AI rack system, dubbed "Helios." She highlighted its expanding roster of customers, which includes Microsoft, as the company prepares for its shipment later this year. Dr. Su also introduced AMD’s newest chips, specifically designed to power the rapidly growing and compute-hungry AI industry.
Rack systems are powerful units that integrate numerous processors into a single, cohesive structure. These systems are purpose-built for data centers, where they are crucial for training and operating advanced AI models and other demanding computational workloads.
Dr. Su heralded Helios as the technology industry’s “highest performance AI rack,” emphasizing that it was “built to train and run the most demanding frontier models in the world at massive scale.” The company confirmed that leading AI enterprises are slated to deploy the system at a gigawatt-scale.
Nvidia has historically dominated this specialized market with its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems. AMD's latest move clearly signifies its ambition to capture a significant share. Reports from The Register indicate that Helios’ performance metrics position it as a formidable contender, surpassing Vera Rubin in several key benchmarks.
Helios, which was initially revealed in 2025 and subsequently demonstrated on stage at CES 2026 in January, has already secured commitments from several prominent customers, including OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Anthropic, and Microsoft, all of whom plan to deploy the system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on Monday that his company would enhance its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Furthermore, Anthropic and AMD disclosed a strategic partnership on Wednesday, aiming to deploy up to two gigawatts of GPUs through the new rack system.
Additionally, AMD introduced its Venice-X CPU on Thursday, a processor designed for data centers and tailored to handle high-computing workloads. The Venice-X is anticipated to launch in 2027.
In her remarks, Dr. Su commented on the evolving landscape of the chip industry, projecting that by 2030, chips dedicated to powering AI would constitute a massive portion of the overall computing market. She attributed this monumental shift to the industry experiencing a “step change in compute demand,” largely propelled by the rise of agentic AI.
Elaborating on the computational intensity, the executive stated, “When you ask the agent to do something, it actually has dozens of steps, and it has to reason, and it has to call tools, and it has to access data, and it has to keep doing it over and over until it solves the problem, and so you need lots of GPUs to do all that.”
Dr. Su further projected the significant financial growth within this sector, asserting, “We’re now expecting that by 2030, the AI accelerator market is going to reach about $1.4 trillion. What that means is, by the end of the decade, the AI accelerator market is going to approach the size of the entire semiconductor market today.”
She concluded by highlighting the anticipated dominance of graphics processing units, adding, “We do expect that GPUs are going to make up the vast majority of that market because the algorithms are still very much in their infancy, and we’re still continuing to see the workloads change, and that favors programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem.”
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