AMD is launching its next generation of AI data center hardware Thursday at an event in San Francisco, seeking to capture market share from Nvidia in the data center chip sector, according to Reuters.
The company is formally introducing its Helios rack-scale system, which combines Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking chips, and ROCm software in an integrated platform for AI training and inference, AMD said. The company is also expected to formally launch its Venice CPU for data centers, according to Reuters.
The launch follows two major customer commitments announced this week. On Wednesday, AMD announced a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in Helios rack-scale systems, with the first gigawatt of deployment beginning in the first half of 2027. AMD also committed to make a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic, the company said.
As part of the partnership, AMD and Anthropic are launching a multi-year engineering collaboration to use Anthropic’s Claude AI to optimize workloads for AMD Instinct GPUs and accelerate AMD’s ROCm software development. AMD will also adopt Claude across its engineering and product development teams.
“Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,” said Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, in a statement. “By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimizing it for training and serving Claude.”
Earlier this week, AMD also announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft, under which Microsoft will deploy Helios on Azure to power frontier model inference. AMD said it expects to begin shipping Helios to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
On the Microsoft deal, AMD positions Helios as its first rival to Nvidia’s rack-scale AI systems. Nvidia commands upward of 95% of the data center GPU market, with AMD holding around 4.5%, according to Futurum Group estimates cited by CNBC. 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 in a statement that the Anthropic deal “brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing.”