By Laura Hyde |
Microsoft is expanding Azure’s AI and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities by integrating AMD’s latest Helios AI platform and EPYC processors into its cloud infrastructure.
Microsoft will deploy the Helios Rackscale platform, which combines AMD’s EPYC Venice processors with Instinct MI455X GPUs and Pensando Vulcano networking technology, to support frontier AI model inference for its customers.
The jointly engineered infrastructure will power three upcoming Azure offerings: HDv2 virtual machines (VMs) for large-scale data processing; HXv2 VMs for electronic design automation; and ND MI455X v7 VMs for AI inference workloads. Together, these offerings have been designed to help organisations deploy and scale generative AI models more efficiently.
“Our approach to AI infrastructure is designed to support the breadth of how AI systems are built and run,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud + AI at Microsoft in a blog post.
“We closely work with industry innovators like AMD, as well as our own purpose-built silicon and systems, to provide customers with a comprehensive, open and heterogenous platform to achieve the best performance, cost and energy efficiency outcomes.”
AMD will begin shipping Helios to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
“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 Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO at AMD. “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 is expanding its Azure AI and HPC infrastructure with AMD’s latest Helios AI platform