AMD launches new AI server in direct challenge to Nvidia's AI dominance

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su told a San Francisco audience on Thursday that AMD’s Helios rack scale system is in full production, setting the chipmaker up to assess the AI data center business that Nvidia has controlled almost by itself.

It is the first time AMD has fielded a complete server cabinet built to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s top rack.

AMD Helios server rack components

Helios packs 72 of AMD’s new Instinct MI455X GPUs and pairs them with the company’s Epyc server CPUs all in a single rack. This configuration puts it up there with Nvidia’s NVL72, which also runs 72 GPUs and draws on the Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin parts.

Su stated during her keynote at the Advancing AI event that the MI455X was the most powerful GPU on the market, a claim directly aimed at the current leader.

Constellation Research, reporting from the event, said each MI455X carries 432GB of HBM4 memory, moves data at 23.3 TB/s, and holds about 320 billion transistors. A full server rack can get up to 2.9 exaflops of peak FP4 compute, 31 terabytes of HBM4 memory, and 1.7 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth.

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