AMD launches Helios, its first rack AI system to rival Nvidia, adding Microsoft as newest buyer
- Microsoft announced Monday it will deploy AMD Helios racks in its Azure data centers, joining other early customers Meta, OpenAI and Oracle.
- Helios is AMD's first rack-scale system for AI and its most competitive move against Nvidia yet. It will ship later this year.
- CNBC got an exclusive first detailed look inside AMD's new system at the Texas lab where it's being developed and tested.
After a decade-long comeback, chip giant Advanced Micro Devices is preparing to ship its first rack-scale system for artificial intelligence, called Helios, to a growing list of customers that now includes Microsoft.
It's the first rival to Nvidia's wildly popular Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems, and is aiming to give the world's most valuable chipmaker its first real competition in years.
Microsoft announced Monday it will use the Helios system in its data centers, joining Meta, OpenAI, Oracle and others in a race to grab as much compute as possible.
AMD will begin shipping to customers, including Microsoft, later this year. Shares of AMD climbed more than 4% on Monday. Microsoft stock climbed more than 1%.
Details about financial terms or the amount of compute capacity weren't disclosed.
"We are expanding the Azure infrastructure portfolio with AMD Helios to give customers the performance, scale and choice they need to build and run the next generation of AI applications," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a press release.
The new Helios system will power frontier model inference for Microsoft, its AI customers and support Azure AI services. Microsoft will also add two new computing instances run on AMD's latest "Venice" central processing units, or CPUs, one for agentic AI and data pipelines, and another for semiconductor design.
It's the continuation of a longtime partnership, with AMD chips powering Microsoft's Surface PCs and Xbox gaming consoles for many years. In 2023, Microsoft was also the first to adopt AMD's MI300X graphics processing unit, or GPU, that rivaled Nvidia's AI chips. Microsoft also deploys its own Maia chips in its data centers.
Like its peers, Microsoft needs as much compute as possible, especially as it ramps up its own model development and allocates more computing capacity to research and development. In June, it announced seven models built in-house. Microsoft's AI efforts thus far have seen mixed results, from its 365 Copilot AI assistant to its GitHub Copilot coding agent. It's the worst-performing "Magnificent Seven" stock so far this year.
Microsoft is part of a growing number of big companies turning to AMD for AI acceleration. AMD says eight of the top 10 AI companies run workloads on its Instinct GPUs, including OpenAI, Cohere and Elon Musk's SpaceXAI, which is part of SpaceX.
In February, Meta announced it'll use up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs over time, starting with 1 gigawatt deployed on Helios racks later this year. OpenAI and Oracle also made major commitments to deploy Helios this year, with India's largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Services, committing to use it as well.
CNBC got the world's first detailed look inside a Helios system, from the Texas data center lab where it's being developed and tested.
'Lowest cost per token'
Named for an ancient Greek god who pulls the sun across the sky with the help of four horses, Helios brings together four things AMD does in-house: GPUs, CPUs, networking and software.
"We're very focused on providing the best total cost of ownership, the lowest cost per token, all in," data center head Forrest Norrod told CNBC about AMD's first-generation system. "And our customers are telling us that we're achieving that."
In May, AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC's Jim Cramer that Helios has "significant benefits" over Nvidia's rack-scale systems, "when you're talking about inference and when you're talking about memory bandwidth and memory capabilities."
While AMD wouldn't comment on cost, the Futurum Group estimates Helios will cost between $5 million and $5.5 million. That's compared with Futurum estimates of $3.5 million to $4 million for Nvidia's second-generation rack-scale system, Vera Rubin.
At up to 7,000 pounds, Helios is also wider and heavier than Nvidia's Vera Rubin.
Nvidia controls more than 95% of the data center GPU market, according to the Futurum Group. AMD only holds some 4.5% of the market, but Helios could change that.
"I think there's a serious case in which AMD does great and can get to 20% and 25%. And by the way, this is hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue," said Daniel Newman, analyst and CEO of the Futurum Group.
In the first quarter of 2026, data centers made up the majority of AMD's revenue, up 57% year over year. AMD told CNBC that it plans to book tens of billions in data center AI revenue starting in 2027, the majority coming from Helios.
In data center CPU market share, Intel remains the clear leader, but AMD has steadily been gaining ground. This CPU leadership sets AMD apart from Nvidia, which launched its first server CPU in 2021 and shifted strategies to renew focus on the chips this year.
'A very different AMD'
Norrod called Helios "our baby," as he showed CNBC the system's core chips. Each of its 18 compute trays has four Instinct GPUs powered by a single EPYC central processing unit.
It was these EPYC data center CPUs that helped AMD regain a decade of lost leadership in the data center market.
In 2003, AMD had a groundbreaking data center CPU that helped it rapidly gain nearly a quarter of the market, but that slice withered away following a series of delays and missteps that led to major layoffs and shrinking revenue by the time Su took the helm.
"Under Lisa's leadership for the last 12 years, it's been a very different AMD," Norrod said.
Things turned around after the company unveiled the first EPYC server CPU on stage in 2017.
"One of the things that we did is we laid out our road map in detail for three generations, which is very unusual," he said. "And we delivered exactly what we said."
Part of AMD's road map included plans to launch Helios with the current MI400 series of GPU.
Each Helios tray also has up to 12 networking chips made with technology AMD acquired when it bought Pensando in 2022.
It was one of several acquisitions that has helped enable Helios development in the last few years.
AMD's largest purchase to date was programmable chip company Xilinx for nearly $50 billion in 2022. AMD also acquired server maker ZT systems for nearly $5 billion in 2025, and a series of software companies that helped it develop ROCm, its open-source alternative to Nvidia's widely adopted CUDA software ecosystem.
Counterpoint Research analyst Neil Shah said AMD's Helios chips are "on par" with Nvidia GPUs and CPUs, but the "secret sauce is in the software and optimization."
"With CUDA, I think Nvidia has a bigger ecosystem, and it's quite ahead versus AMD," he said.
With Helios, AMD has the opportunity to make substantial strides, depending on how well early deployments fare.
"The question is going to be: Is AMD winning because they are technologically superior? Or does AMD win because there's just such a constraint on capacity that if they can build it, someone will buy it?" Newman said.
WATCH: First look at Vera Rubin, Nvidia's AI system that's 10 times more efficient than Grace Blackwell
— CNBC's Jordan Novet contributed to this report.