AMD adds Microsoft to its growing roster of Helios customers as firm launches three new VMs for Azure users
The collaboration marks the latest big tech customer for AMD’s “game changer” Helios system
Microsoft has announced it will deploy AMD’s Helios rack-scale solution as it targets data processing and AI inference gains for Azure customers.
The collaboration will see three new AMD EPYC CPU-powered virtual machine (VM) offerings made available through Azure. These include:
- HDv2 VMs
- HCx2 VMs
- ND MI455X v7 VMs
The first of these, Azure HDv2, is designed for large-scale data processing and to “empower massive agentic workload adoption”.
Featuring 500 sixth-generation EPYC CPU cores, HDv2 VMs boast 4TB of RAM, 32TB of local NVMe storage, and 500Gbps Azure Boost networking capabilities.
Azure HCx2 VMs, meanwhile, are designed primarily for silicon design and technical computing tasks, such as scientific simulations and engineering analysis.
This series builds on the design of Azure HX virtual machines, which the company launched in partnership with AMD in 2023.
HXv2 VMs will include 176 AMD sixth-gen EPYC CPU cores. These offer “significantly increased” per-VM and per-core performance and will also include 800GB InfinBand for “large-scale MPI-based simulations”.
Elsewhere, the ND MI455X v7 specifically targets “production-scale” AI inference improvements for Azure customers.
“ND MI455X v7 is designed for the reasoning, search and agentic workloads behind modern AI services,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
“Powered by the AMD Helios rackscale solution, it expands Azure’s infrastructure options for large-scale inference and is designed to deliver strong performance and efficiency for demanding AI workloads.”
The move makes Microsoft the latest in a string of big tech customers flocking to the Helios system. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said the deal builds on long-standing ties between the duo.
“AMD and Microsoft have spent years building high-performance infrastructure together, and today we're extending that partnership across the full stack of AMD AI solutions on Azure,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su.
“Microsoft's new AMD deployments mark an important milestone as we deliver leadership compute solutions to Azure customers and scale the next generation of AI infrastructure together.”
Microsoft targets “scale and choice” for customers
Helios is AMD’s first rack-scale system designed specifically for frontier model training and large-scale AI inference. The system combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software..
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the collaboration marks a significant expansion of Azure infrastructure capabilities.
“Customers are looking for AI infrastructure that is optimized for a wide range of workloads, from training and inference to data preparation, search, and reinforcement learning," he said.
"Through our collaboration with AMD, we are expanding the Azure infrastructure portfolio with AMD Helios to give customers the performance, scale and choice they need to build and run the next generation of AI applications.”
Helios roll-out pending
AMD unveiled the Helios rack-scale solution at its 2025 Advancing AI conference. The solution offers an alternative to – and competes with – Nvidia’s Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems.
At the time, Su described the launch of Helios as a “game changer” that’s “purpose built for the most demanding AI workloads”.
A host of major tech providers, including Meta, OpenAI, HPE, and Oracle have since confirmed they’ll deploy the solution in data centers.
The chipmaker will begin shipping Helios to customers in the second half of 2026.
Although exact timelines haven’t been revealed, the collaboration with Microsoft comes just days ahead of AMD’s 2026 Advancing AI conference, in which customers can likely expect real-world examples of the system in action.
ITPro will be live on the ground in San Francisco for AMD’s annual conference this week.
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