AMD unveils Helios rack and MI455X accelerator in bid to close the gap with Nvidia

AMD unveiled a suite of new data centre products at its Advancing AI event in San Francisco on Thursday, claiming they will outperform Nvidia’s competing hardware across AI training and inference. The announcements included the MI455X AI accelerator, the Helios server rack that packs 72 of those chips into a single system, and the Venice generation of Epyc server processors built on TSMC’s two-nanometre process. AMD predicted the total market it is pursuing will reach $2 trillion by 2030, with AI accelerators alone accounting for more than a trillion dollars of that figure.

Investors were unimpressed, sending AMD shares down about four percent during the presentation despite the stock having more than doubled in value this year. The scepticism reflects the gap between AMD’s ambitions and Nvidia’s dominance: Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform is already in full production and shipping to customers including OpenAI, CoreWeave, and Microsoft. AMD CEO Lisa Su has delivered a remarkable growth run, but Wall Street’s expectations were already baked into a stock that had risen roughly 145 percent year to date heading into the event.

Su brought executives from major AI companies on stage to endorse AMD’s hardware. OpenAI’s Sachin Katti said his company expects to deploy Helios “at massive scale” as it scrambles to add infrastructure capacity. The event came a day after AMD announced it would invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic and deploy two gigawatts of MI450 series GPUs in Helios racks to run Claude, with the first gigawatt shipping in the first half of 2027.

AMD also announced a partnership with Cerebras, whose wafer-scale chips specialise in ultra-fast AI inference, to combine Helios racks with Cerebras servers for customers who need the lowest possible latency. AMD hardware will handle the work of deciphering queries while Cerebras chips provide rapid answers. Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman said the combined product will ship from Cerebras-owned data centres starting in the fourth quarter and will beat a similar offering Nvidia is assembling from its recent Groq acquisition.

The Venice Epyc processor, meanwhile, is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s push into server CPUs with its Vera chip, which Nvidia has claimed gives it a performance edge. AMD said Venice will keep it well ahead of Vera, setting up a direct contest that independent benchmarks have yet to settle. The rivalry now spans accelerators, server processors, and complete rack-scale systems, with both companies pitching end-to-end data centre solutions rather than individual components.