AMD announced an expanded strategic partnership with Microsoft that covers AMD GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software on Azure. Under the expanded partnership, Microsoft will deploy the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution at scale on Azure. The deployment will power frontier model inference for Microsoft, its AI customers, and Azure AI services. AMD will begin shipping Helios to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
AMD Helios integrates AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software in an open rackscale platform designed for large-scale AI training and inference.
Azure will introduce two new virtual machine series powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC “Venice” processors: Azure HDv2 for agentic AI and data pipelines, and Azure HXv2 for semiconductor design. These additions broaden Azure’s AMD EPYC portfolio across AI, data, and engineering workloads.
The companies are also expanding the use of AMD Pensando DPUs in Azure’s AI backend networking infrastructure and select Azure services. Microsoft and AMD are integrating AMD silicon with Azure Boost to improve cloud networking performance across the fleet.
“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, AMD.
“Customers are looking for AI infrastructure that is optimized for a wide range of workloads, from training and inference to data preparation, search, and reinforcement learning,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Through our collaboration with AMD, we are expanding the Azure infrastructure portfolio with AMD Helios to give customers the performance, scale and choice they need to build and run the next generation of AI applications.”
The collaboration increases access to AMD AI infrastructure on Azure for frontier model builders and enterprise customers using Azure Foundry Managed Compute.
