At AMD Advancing AI, Helios was the star around which everything else revolved

Coming to California for AMD Advancing AI is something of a unique experience. While it has many of the trimmings of a regular tech conference – the show floor, the keynote, the product launches – it’s also known for its brevity. It may billed as a two-day event, but realistically the meat of the event takes place during the second day.

The announcements this year lent themselves to this presentation strategy perhaps more than any other, because sitting at the center of it all is AMD’s rack-scale architecture, Helios.

The dawn of Helios began at the last Advancing AI summit, in 2025, with many of the technical specifications made public at the same time. For example, it had already been stated that the system would feature the company’s next generation MI400 chipset but until last week, we didn’t know which specific GPU it would use nor the specs.

All has now been revealed, though, which is helpful for would-be buyers, although this system is not for the casual customer. In fact, it was arguably AMD’s big name customers for Helios that were on display this week as much as the tech itself – a shining corona of Anthropic, Dell, HPE, OpenAI, and more.

It’s clear that AMD is proud of its continuing relationships both with traditional hardware vendors and relative newcomers. Strategically, it makes sense too – keep your options broad and there’s greater defence against any potential ‘market turbulence’, shall we say.

From the macro to the mini

As I predicted, there wasn’t much conversation around AMD’s consumer offerings, although they did have a spot on the show floor, having already had their moment at Computex in June.

That doesn’t mean Helios was the only hardware on show, though. Accompanying the massive double-wide, rack scale solution was a diminutive cube with an equally mythological codename: Gorgon.

Gorgon – or, to give it its true production name, Ryzen AI Halo – was something of a ‘rabbit out of a hat’ moment. I think most delegates came expecting chips and giant infrastructure, so the appearance of Halo right at the end of the keynote was unexpected.

Halo has decent specs: 128GB unified memory and the ability to run 200 billion models natively. It’s expressly designed for developers currently but, according to AMD SVP and GM of compute and enterprise AI Dan McNamara, it “implies a future of personal AI for everyone”. Quite what that means beyond lower latency, I’m not sure.

Either way, it's available now through Micro Center with the tone of the announcement leaving the door open to other partners in future. I do wonder, however, how popular this will be given AMD's traditional enterprise route to market has been inside other OEMs' hardware.

I'm also not quite sure where it competes. The seemingly obvious answer is Dell's Nvidia-powered Deskside Agentic AI stable – particularly the GB10 – but the concept isn't quite the same given there's no emphasis on agentic AI.

Nevertheless, it is very lovely to look at and, if you’re looking for a desktop AI PC with a small form factor then it's another option.

You can catch up with all the announcements from this year's AMD Advancing AI here, including more on Helios and the new Instinct MI455X GPUs.