AMD will ship its first rack-type artificial intelligence system, Helios, to customers from late this year. Microsoft has joined as a new customer, CNBC reported on July 20 (local time).

Microsoft plans to deploy Helios in its data centres for frontier model inference, customer AI workloads and Azure AI services. It will also add 2 new computing instances based on AMD’s latest Venice CPUs. One is for agentic AI and data pipelines, and the other is for semiconductor design.

Helios is AMD’s first rack-unit AI system and is positioned against Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin. It integrates GPUs, CPUs, networking and software.

Helios will use MI400-series GPUs and EPYC CPUs. Each compute tray includes 4 Instinct GPUs and 1 EPYC CPU, and each tray can hold up to 12 networking chips. AMD said it has prepared Helios and the ROCm ecosystem based on acquisitions including Pensando, Xilinx, ZT Systems and several software companies.

AMD plans to supply Helios to customers including Microsoft from late this year. It did not disclose contract terms or computing capacity.

More companies are adopting Helios. Meta said in February it would use up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs over the long term and plans to deploy 1 gigawatt first in Helios racks by the end of this year. OpenAI, Oracle and Tata Consultancy Services also pledged to adopt Helios this year. AMD said 8 of the top 10 AI companies run workloads on its Instinct GPUs.

AMD cited cost efficiency and performance as Helios strengths. Forrest Norrod (포리스트 노로드), head of AMD’s data centre business, said it is focused on lowering total cost of ownership and cost per token. Lisa Su (리사 수), AMD CEO, also said in a May interview that Helios has significant advantages over Nvidia systems in inference, memory bandwidth and memory performance.

But the gap in market share remains large. According to Fume Group, Nvidia accounts for more than 95 percent of the data centre GPU market, while AMD’s share is about 4.5 percent. AMD said its first-quarter 2026 data centre revenue rose 57 percent from a year earlier. It also said data centre AI revenue will start to be reflected at the scale of tens of billions of dollars from 2027, and expected most of that to come from Helios.