AMD Advancing AI 2026: Helios on the rise, with launch of new Instinct GPUs
The rack-scale architecture announced in 2025 is finally rolling off the production line
AMD has launched its latest Instinct GPUs, the MI455X, in tandem with bringing its Helios AI architecture into production at AMD Advancing AI 2026.
Helios, which was announced at last year’s annual conference, is the company’s flagship hardware product, integrating Epyc CPUs, Instinct GPUs, Pensando networking, and Rocm software stack.
“Helios is really the system that scales to be an AI factory,” said Andrew Dieckman, CVP and GM of data center and GPU at AMD. “We set out to build the world’s highest-performing rack and we believe we have delivered the world’s highest performing rack.”
According to AMD, Helios has 15% more AI compute, 50% more memory, and 50% more scale-out bandwidth than Nvidia’s competitor offering, Vera Rubin NVL72.
At the heart of Helios – the “engine” in Dieckman’s words – is the new AMD Instinct MI455X CPU. The MI400 series features increased HBM4 capacity and bandwidth, expanded AI formats with higher throughput, and standard-based rack-scale networking.
In Helios, the MI455X acts as the accelerator, delivering 40 petaflops of peak FB4 compute, with 423GB of HBM core and a peak memory bandwidth of 23.3 terabytes per second of memory per GPU.
In addition to the new MI455X GPU, Helios also features 6th Gen AMD Epyc server CPUs with 96 high-frequency cores and 1.6TB/s of memory bandwidth, as well as AMD Pensando and UALoE networking fabric.
This can scale up to 260TB/s bandwidth and host 72 GPUs on one domain.
AMD showcases Helios partners
With Helios already in production, AMD was keen to show off some of its partners that are deploying – or pledged to deploy – the system. These include OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Bull, Cisco, Tensorwave, and more.
“Helios is a big step forward for AMD because we’re moving to a full rack-scale architecture where we provide all the components in a really co-designed engine and co-engineered rack, so that [customers] can get the full benefit out of the complete AMD end-to-end solution,” said Dieckman.
“We continue to be very focused on driving improved economics for our customers – making sure that we deliver the most tokens per dollar within the market.”
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