AMD set to unveil new AI hardware as it steps up challenge to Nvidia

SAN FRANCISCO: Advanced Micro Devices is expected to introduce a new lineup of artificial intelligence infrastructure on Thursday as it seeks to compete more aggressively with Nvidia in the expanding data centre chip market.

The company is aiming to win a larger share of business tied to AI computing, particularly inference workloads — the processing used when users submit prompts to chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. AMD is likely to present data centre products including its first-generation server rack system, Helios, which it is positioning against a comparable Nvidia platform. Nvidia, for its part, is rolling out a second-generation version of its own design this year.

AMD is also expected to officially introduce its Venice central processing unit for data centres. The development comes days after Nvidia disclosed further technical information about its Vera CPU, which it said would work with its Rubin graphics processing unit to improve how much AI work can be carried out for a given amount of power.

Activity around AMD’s event was already visible on Wednesday at the Moscone West convention centre in San Francisco, where hundreds of executives and engineers attended technical sessions and met on the exhibition floor, according to a Reuters witness. AMD displayed the Helios rack there alongside booths from cloud computing firms including Vultr and TensorWave, both of which run data centres using AMD equipment.

Recent deals with AI companies

On Wednesday, AMD said it planned to sell up to two gigawatts of its Instinct MI450 chips to AI company Anthropic starting in the first half of 2027. The arrangement also includes an investment of up to $5 billion in the maker of Claude.

AMD had previously announced, in October, a multi-year agreement with OpenAI that could generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. That agreement also gives the ChatGPT developer the option to acquire up to about 10% of AMD.

The expected product announcements underscore AMD’s push to strengthen its position in AI-focused data centre hardware as competition with Nvidia intensifies.