AMD takes on Nvidia with its Helios AI rack-scale system

Chipmaker AMD is taking aim at rival Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a rack-scale system designed to support the computing needs of the world’s largest AI labs.

At the company’s sold-out Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD Chairman and CEO Dr. Lisa Su the 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 pitched the company’s latest chips designed to feed the AI ​​industry’s computer-hungry dragon.

Rack systems combine many processors into one single powerful 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 “best-performing AI rack,” adding that it was “built to train and run the world’s most demanding frontier models at scale.” The system will be deployed by leading AI companies at gigawatt scale, the company said.

Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems. AMD clearly wants in on the action. And Helios’ performance stats seem to give it a real chance, beating Vera Rubin on a number of stats: The Register reports this.

Helios, which was unveiled in 2025 and shown on stage at CES 2026 in January, already has several high-profile 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 would expand its Azure infrastructure with Helios. Meanwhile, Anthropic and AMD announced a strategic partnership Up to two gigawatts of GPUs will be deployed through the new rack system on Wednesday.

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

During her remarks, Su commented on the trajectory of the chip industry, claiming that chips powering AI will account for a large portion of the overall computer market by the year 2030. This is because the industry is “seeing a step change in demand for computing,” driven in large part by the rise of agentic AI, she said.

“When you ask the agent to do something, there are actually 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 that over and over again until it solves the problem, and so you need a lot of GPUs to do all that,” the director said.

“We now expect the AI ​​accelerator market to reach approximately $1.4 trillion by 2030,” Su said. “What that means is that by the end of the decade, the market for AI accelerators will approach the size of the current semiconductor market.”

“We expect GPUs to make up the vast majority of that market because the algorithms are still in their infancy, and we’re still seeing workloads change, and that drives programmability in the overall silicon ecosystem,” she added.