Advanced Micro Devices is set to launch a broad lineup of AI hardware at its Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco on Thursday, in a direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance in the data center chip market.
The centrepiece is Helios, AMD's first-generation server rack system, which the company is positioning as a competitor to Nvidia's similar rack-based design. Nvidia is currently rolling out its second-generation product. AMD will also formally launch its Venice central processing unit for data centres.
The announcement comes a day after AMD said it plans to sell up to two gigawatts of its Instinct MI450 chips to Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, beginning in the first half of 2027. The deal includes an investment of as much as $5 billion in Anthropic. AMD also has a multiyear agreement with OpenAI that could bring in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue while giving OpenAI the option to buy up to roughly 10 percent of the chipmaker [1].
The push into inference computing, the processing that happens when a user queries a chatbot, is where AMD sees the most room to capture market share from Nvidia.