Microsoft signs on to rack AI system that rivals Nvidia

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.

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.

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