When you come across an AI video on Instagram, or watch ChatGPT respond to your query, do you ever think about how that content was generated? Beyond the actual programs and prompts, generative AI takes an enormous amount of compute to support, especially as it skyrockets in popularity. As such, AI companies are looking for more power than ever, which means, of course, turning to those that make the hardware.
AMD calls Helios “The world’s best AI rack”
During a Monday evening keynote, AMD’s CEO Dr. Lisa Su showed off the hardware that will soon power everything from ChatGPT to the AI videos overwhelming your feeds. Su introduced “Helios” against a backdrop of dramatic music, the company’s upcoming AI rack, that packs a staggering amount of computing power into a rack that weighs nearly 7,000 pounds.
Each “cross-section” of these racks, if you will, is powered by four key AMD pieces of hardware: The company’s new AMD Instinct MI455X GPU, the new AMD EPYC “Veince” CPU, the AMD Pensando “Vulcano” 800 AI NIC, and the AMD Pensando “Salina” 400 DPU. There are some staggering stats here: Helios is capable of 2.9 exaflops of AI compute, and comes with 31 TB of HBM4 memory. It offers 43 TB per second scale out Bandwidth, and is developed with 2nm and 3nm architecture. The rack has 4,600 “Zen 6” CPU cores, and 18,000 GPU compute units. In other words, this isn’t your average piece of hardware.
Su’s pitch is that the AI industry is in need of this additional compute power. She notes how the world used one ZettaFlop of computing power in 2022 on AI technology, compared to 100 ZettaFlops in 2025. (For the curious, one ZettaFlop has a value of 10 to the power of 21.) It’s no surprise: AI is everywhere, and many of us are using it—whether we know it or not. Some of us are using it overtly, generating AI videos or running chatbots daily. But others are using AI quietly embedded in functions, like live translation.
Su welcomed reps from OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and Luma AI, which creates generative AI video content, to talk about how additional compute helps their programs. But during Luma AI’s demonstration of its hyperrealistic video generations, all I could think about was how this type of content is already tricking people into thinking its real, when it’s entirely fabricated—not to mention the impact on human artists. AMD is optimistic about AI, and the data centers powering it, but critics have been pushing back, citing concerns with the impacts on the communities companies are building these data centers in.
What do you think so far?
Helios will likely be a major success for AMD, but it comes at an interesting time for tech, and AI in general. AI is more popular than ever, but it’s also more controversial than ever. I see hardware like Helios only fueling the fire in both directions.
AMD Ryzen AI 400 series
In addition to Helios, Su announced the AMD Ryzen AI 400 series. These newest chips comes with either 12 “Zen 5” CPU cores and 24 threads, 16 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores, a 60 TOPS XDNA 2 NPU, and memory speeds of 8,533 MT/s. AMD says the Ryzen AI 400 series is 1.7 times faster at content creation and 1.3 times faster at multitasking whe compared to Intel Core Ultra 9 288V.
These new chips will ship soon in a number of major PC brands, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Beelink, Colorful, Gigabyte, LG, Mechrevo, MSI, and NEC.
