AMD (AMD) Stock Gains as Helios Launch Targets Nvidia’s AI Crown

TLDR

• AMD is launching its Helios rack-scale AI system Thursday in San Francisco, directly targeting Nvidia’s data center dominance.
• Helios combines Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC Venice CPUs, Pensando networking chips, and ROCm software in one integrated platform.
• AMD announced a deal with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 GPUs, with AMD investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
• Microsoft will deploy Helios on Azure for frontier model inference, with shipments starting in the second half of 2026.
• AMD holds around 4.5% of the data center GPU market versus Nvidia’s 95%-plus, but its data center revenue grew 57% year-over-year to $5.78 billion in Q1 2026.

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AMD is making its biggest push yet into AI infrastructure, launching new hardware and landing major customer deals — but Nvidia’s lead remains enormous.

AMD stock was up roughly 1.45% on Thursday as the company officially kicked off its AI hardware event at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD

The centerpiece of the launch is Helios, AMD’s first rack-scale AI system. It bundles Instinct MI455X GPUs, EPYC Venice CPUs, Pensando networking chips, and ROCm software into a single platform designed for both AI training and inference.

Helios is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s own rack-scale systems. Nvidia currently holds over 95% of the data center GPU market. AMD sits at around 4.5%, according to Futurum Group estimates cited by CNBC.

AMD is also formally launching the Venice CPU for data centers at the event — a chip that has been in the pipeline for some time.

The launch follows a flurry of partnership announcements earlier this week that gave AMD some serious commercial backing heading into Thursday.

AMD and Anthropic Deal

On Wednesday, AMD announced a partnership with Anthropic to deploy up to 2 gigawatts of Instinct MI450 Series GPUs inside Helios systems. The first gigawatt of deployment is set to begin in the first half of 2027.

AMD is also making a strategic equity investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic as part of the deal.

The two companies will run a multi-year engineering collaboration. The goal is to use Anthropic’s Claude AI to optimize workloads on AMD Instinct GPUs and speed up development of AMD’s ROCm software stack.

AMD will also roll out Claude across its own engineering and product development teams internally.

Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, said: “By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimizing it for training and serving Claude.”

Microsoft Partnership

Earlier this week, AMD also expanded its partnership with Microsoft. Under the deal, Microsoft will deploy Helios on Azure to run frontier model inference workloads.

AMD expects to begin shipping Helios to customers — including Microsoft — in the second half of 2026.

In October 2025, AMD also announced a multiyear deal with OpenAI that could bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. That deal gives OpenAI the option to buy up to roughly 10% of AMD.

AMD’s data center segment posted $5.78 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, up 57% from the same period the prior year. Growth was driven by demand for EPYC server processors and Instinct GPU shipments.

CEO Lisa Su said the Anthropic deal “brings together Anthropic’s leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing.”

AMD now has committed customers in Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI for its next-generation AI hardware — a lineup that marks a clear step up in its challenge to Nvidia.