AMD announced an expanded strategic partnership with Microsoft spanning GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software on Microsoft Azure. As part of the deal, Microsoft will deploy the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution to support frontier model AI inference for Microsoft, its AI customers, and Azure AI services. Azure will also add two new AMD EPYC CPU-powered VM series and expand its deployment of Pensando DPUs for supporting Azure networking services. AMD plans to begin shipping Helios to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
AMD Helios combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking and ROCm software in an open, integrated rackscale platform built for large-scale AI training and inference. The Azure deployment will use Helios for inference workloads spanning frontier models, Azure AI services and customer applications.
“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. “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.”
“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 expands access to AMD AI infrastructure across Azure. Frontier model builders can now leverage AMD-powered infrastructure to train and serve large-scale AI models, while enterprise customers can deploy and scale production AI workloads through Azure Foundry Managed Compute.
Azure’s new VM series, Azure HDv2 for agentic AI and data pipelines, and Azure HXv2 for semiconductor design, will be powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC “Venice” processors. Together, the new VM series broaden Azure’s AMD EPYC portfolio across AI, data and engineering workloads.
The collaboration also extends into the networking layer that connects and scales Azure infrastructure. Building on Microsoft’s broad deployment of AMD Pensando DPUs, the companies are integrating Azure Boost with AMD technologies to improve networking performance, efficiency and connection processing at cloud scale.
