By Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, July 23 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices' second generation of AI servers, which aim to compete against Nvidia’s flagship products, are in full production and will start shipping in the coming months, CEO Lisa Su said on Thursday.
The Helios servers will contain AMD’s latest MI455X AI accelerator with its new Venice central processor, both of which are made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. During Su's keynote address at an event in San
Francisco, OpenAI's top computing executive joined Su to say that the ChatGPT creator plans to start using the Helios racks later this year.
“Helios is in full production,” Su said, adding that shipments are slated to start at the end of the third quarter. “Customer demand for Helios is extremely strong.”
AMD is attempting to capture market share from Nvidia in the fast-growing data center chip sector, especially for inference computing, which is the data crunching that occurs when a user queries a chatbot such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.
When asked at a press conference whether AMD was content to remain in second place, Su said, "We're actually doing another major leap forward. We actually believe we will have leadership in the scale-up compute domain."
Su said AMD thinks the total computing market will hit $2 trillion by 2030, with $1.4 trillion of that from chips that speed up AI and $220 billion of it from central processing units (CPUs), an area in which it has long competed against Intel and that Nvidia has entered. The total computing market was worth an estimated $365 billion in 2025, according to AMD's estimates.
"There's no one company that can solve it all," Su said.
Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Feldman joined Su on stage to say AMD and Cerebras would partner to offer a combination of their AI servers, first in Cerebras data centers.
Cerebras was up about 5% and AMD down about 2% as of the market close.
AMD's share drop likely reflected overall weakness in the U.S. stock market and a selloff of semiconductor stocks, said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at Emarketer.
DATA CENTER HARDWARE UNVEILING
This week, Nvidia released a spate of technical details about its Vera CPU, which aimed to show that the chip, when combined with Nvidia’s Rubin graphics processing unit (GPU), will do the best job at maximizing how much work AI agents can do with a given amount of electricity.
In San Francisco, hundreds of executives and engineers gathered to take in technical presentations and mingle on a showroom floor. During Su's keynote, Sachin Katti, the vice president of compute strategy at OpenAI, said the company was embracing AMD's new hardware.
"We expect that we'll be deploying Helios at massive scale starting towards the end of this year, and then accelerating throughout 2027," Katti said. Katti added that OpenAI plans to use AMD's next generation of MI500 AI chips.
In October, AMD announced a multiyear deal with OpenAI that would also bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue while giving the ChatGPT creator the option to buy up to roughly 10% of the chipmaker.
On Wednesday, AMD announced plans to sell up to two gigawatts of its Instinct MI450 chips to AI lab Anthropic beginning in the first half of 2027. The deal also includes an investment of as much as $5 billion in the Claude maker. Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder, joined Su during her keynote on Thursday to say that Claude had been able to set up AMD's AI servers on its own, over a weekend.
“Anyone, human or AI, can now build real models on your platform,” Brown said.
Su said in the press conference that she expects Anthropic to consume AMD chips through cloud computing partners and potentially through some of Anthropic's own data centers. Their partnership also focuses on helping developers use Claude to build software on AMD, she said.
AMD displayed the Helios data center rack amid booths from cloud computing providers such as Vultr and TensorWave. Both cloud providers operate data centers with AMD hardware.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Rod Nickel)
