AMD has expanded its strategic partnership with Microsoft to provide AI infrastructure across Microsoft Azure, covering GPUs, CPUs, networking technologies, and software.
As part of the collaboration, Microsoft will deploy the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution to support AI inference workloads for its own services, Azure AI offerings, and enterprise customers. AMD said Helios will begin shipping to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
The Helios platform combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th Gen AMD EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and the ROCm software stack in a rack-scale architecture designed for large-scale AI training and inference.
According to the companies, Azure will use the platform for inference workloads supporting frontier AI models, Azure AI services, and customer applications.
The partnership also expands the availability of AMD-powered infrastructure on Azure. Enterprise customers will be able to deploy AI workloads through Azure Foundry Managed Compute, while organizations developing large-scale AI models will gain access to AMD-based infrastructure for training and inference.
Microsoft also announced two new virtual machine (VM) series powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC “Venice” processors:
Azure HDv2, designed for agentic AI workloads and data pipelines. Azure HXv2, intended for semiconductor design workloads.
The new VM families extend Azure’s portfolio of AMD EPYC-based instances across AI, engineering, and data-intensive applications. The collaboration also includes expanded deployment of AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs) to support Azure networking services. Microsoft said it is integrating Azure Boost with AMD networking technologies to improve networking performance, efficiency, and connection processing across its cloud infrastructure.
Published On Jul 21, 2026 at 12:00 PM IST
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