AMD will begin shipping the Helios system, which combines its own GPUs, CPUs, networking chips, and software, to customers including Microsoft later this year
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AMD $AMD announced Monday that Microsoft $MSFT will deploy its Helios rack-scale AI system on Azure to power frontier model inference for Microsoft, its AI customers, and Azure AI services. AMD expects to deliver Helios to Microsoft and other customers before the end of 2026.
Helios combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC "Venice" CPUs, Pensando networking chips, and ROCm software in an integrated rack-scale platform built for large-scale AI training and inference, the company said. Financial terms and the amount of compute capacity were not 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 Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.
Beyond Helios, the expanded partnership covers additional AMD products across Azure. Two new VM series — Azure HDv2, aimed at agentic AI and data pipelines, and Azure HXv2, designed for semiconductor work — will run on 6th Gen AMD EPYC "Venice" processors, the company said. AMD's Pensando data processing units will also see broader deployment in Azure networking infrastructure.
Microsoft is joining a growing list of companies committing to Helios. Meta $META, OpenAI, Oracle $ORCL, and India's Tata Consultancy Services have each made deployments or commitments to the system, according to CNBC. Meta's February commitment called for deploying as much as 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs over time, with an initial 1 gigawatt slated for Helios racks this year.
AMD says Helios is the first rival to Nvidia $NVDA's rack-scale AI systems. According to Futurum Group estimates cited by CNBC, Nvidia commands upward of 95% of the data center GPU market, leaving AMD with around 4.5%.
AMD's data center segment posted $5.78 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, a 57% increase from the prior year, driven by demand for EPYC server processors and Instinct GPU shipments. AMD CEO Lisa Su said at the time that the Helios platform was on track to reach customers before year-end and that the company expected data center server growth to accelerate as supply scales to meet demand.
AMD said it anticipates generating tens of billions of dollars in data center AI revenue from 2027 onward, with Helios expected to be the primary driver.
"AMD and Microsoft have spent years building high-performance infrastructure together, and today we're extending that partnership across the full stack of AMD AI solutions on Azure," Su said in a statement.
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