Lisa Su put demand and benchmarks against Nvidia at the center of the launch, though the figures are AMD's own.
AMD's Helios rack-scale AI system has reached full-volume production, the company's chief executive Lisa Su told an audience at the Advancing AI event in San Francisco on Thursday. She presented Helios as the first complete server cabinet AMD has built to take on Nvidia's leading rack head to head — a direct move against the company that dominates hardware for AI data centers.
Helios is AMD's first system aimed squarely at Nvidia's flagship rack, and the pitch leans on comparisons drawn by AMD itself. Su called the MI455X the strongest GPU anyone can buy, and said Helios beats Nvidia's Vera Rubin by 15% on compute, carries 50% more HBM, and returns 30% more tokens for every dollar spent.
AMD is reported to have already lined up Helios deals with Microsoft and Anthropic, and to have brought OpenAI and Anthropic on stage during the keynote. Su described appetite for the system as extremely strong and forecast that the market for AI accelerators would reach $1.4 trillion by 2030.
AMD also struck a deal with Cerebras to fold its inference chips into the company's data-center offerings, a bet that running models rather than training them will become the dominant workload. Su told the audience that roughly 60% of compute capacity would go to operating models rather than teaching them, and pointed to AI agents as the force driving that shift.
AMD's stock dipped more than 2% while Su was speaking. Yet its shares have climbed 222% over the past 12 months, against Nvidia's 117% over the same stretch — a run that follows years of trailing the leader, a gap AMD has only begun to close this year.