Advanced Micro Devices NASDAQ:AMD rose 4.55% intraday after announcing an expanded partnership with Microsoft NASDAQ:MSFT that will put its Helios rackscale systems to work powering frontier model inference on Azure. Helios is AMD's first rack-scale AI system and its most direct challenge yet to Nvidia's NASDAQ:NVDA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin platforms. Financial terms and committed capacity weren't disclosed.
AMD said it will begin shipping Helios to customers including Microsoft in the second half of 2026. The platform pairs Instinct MI455X GPUs with EPYC "Venice" CPUs, Pensando networking and ROCm software in a single integrated rack.
The deal reaches beyond accelerators. Azure will add two new virtual machine series, HDv2 for agentic AI and data pipelines and HXv2 for semiconductor design, both running on sixth-generation EPYC Venice processors. Microsoft is also broadening its deployment of AMD Pensando DPUs across its AI backend networking and select Azure services, and the two companies are integrating that silicon with Azure Boost to lift networking performance across the fleet.
Microsoft joins a list that already includes Meta NASDAQ:META, OpenAI, Oracle NYSE:ORCL and Tata Consultancy Services. Meta committed in February to as much as 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs over time, starting with 1 gigawatt on Helios racks this year. Nvidia holds more than 95% of the data center GPU market against AMD's roughly 4.5%, according to the Futurum Group.