What to expect at AMD Advancing AI 2026

AMD CEO Lisa Su pictured on stage during the opening keynote presentation at at Computex 2024 in Taiwan. — (Image credit: Getty Images)

AMD Advancing AI 2026 takes place this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with the two-day event largely focusing on the second day, when we will hear from AMD’s CEO Lisa Su.

One notable thing, for me, is a sense that in many ways AMD and the wider chip market is in largely the same position as it was this time last year. Nvidia is still the talk of the town when it comes to AI infrastructure, with CEO Jensen Huang once again guesting at other hardware vendors’ flagship events.

AMD still has HPC pedigree (more on that below) but doesn’t have the cachet Nvidia does, while Intel trails further behind.

Despite this, there are still predictions to be made, so here are three things I expect to see at AMD Advancing AI 2026 and one I don’t.

Helios

AMD Helios, the company’s fully-integrated, rack-scale architecture solution, was unveiled at Advancing AI 2025 but we are yet to see any deployed (at least publicly).

This is despite HPE saying it would have a cluster available in its cloud in the second half of 2026 (for those counting, that’s now) and Oracle stating it will build its AI superclusters on Helios.

What better time to talk about Helios being out in the market than at Advancing AI?

My feeling is it will build on last year’s announcement by wheeling out some real-world examples of the hardware in use, whether as part of the HPE or Oracle partnerships or something else.

Altair MI450 chips

Annual company events in the tech industry are for product launches as much as anything else. Having already made several announcements about its gaming portfolio at Computex 2026 in May, we can probably discount major announcements around Ryzen or Radeon – although there may be a recap.

Instead, one of the flagship announcements could be the company’s highly anticipated next-gen GPU series the MI450 – code named Altair.

Oracle already announced in October 2025 that it would be putting MI450 into OCI once it’s available and rumour has it the company has already inked a deal to sell these chips to Anthropic. Speaking of which…

AI partnerships

AMD – perhaps more than other hardware companies – makes a lot of its relationship with AI businesses.

This includes the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, with the latter’s CEO, Sam Altman, appearing on stage at Advancing AI last year, as well as Hugging Face, PyTorch, and Llama.

I also expect to hear more about what role AMD expects to play in the brave new world of agentic AI

Supercomputing and HPC

While we might hear about high performance computers (HPC) – for example Alice Recoque, which is supposed to start onboarding this year – there may be little conversation around supercomputing more generally.

This is because while an AMD machine has been ranked number one in the Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers consistently since 2022 and held the top two places since November 2024, it was overtaken by a Chinese supercomputer in the June 2026 rankings.

AMD Advancing AI 2026 takes place from 22-23 July, with CEO Lisa Su’s keynote happening on the morning of the second day. I will be on the ground reporting on all the news coming out of the event and providing the usual dose of analysis you have come to expect.

Follow here for all previous years’ coverage and everything from this year as it comes in.

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Jane McCallion is Managing Editor of ITPro and ChannelPro, specializing in data centers, enterprise IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.