Microsoft will deploy AMD’s Helios rackscale solution to power model inference both internally and for its AI customers, with the hardware also set to support the company’s Azure AI services.

In a blog post detailing the planned deployment, Microsoft said it forms part of an expanded partnership with AMD that will span the chip company’s graphics processing units (GPUs), central processing units (CPUs), networking, and software on Microsoft Azure, with Helios sitting “at the center of the expansion.”

The financial terms of the deal or its expected capacity have not been shared.

The agreement will also see Microsoft add two virtual machine (VM) series, Azure HDv2 for agentic AI and data pipelines, and Azure HXv2 for semiconductor design, to Azure. Both will be powered by AMD's sixth-generation Venice EPYC CPUs.

Microsoft will also expand its deployment of Pensando data processing units (DPUs), integrating the hardware into its Azure Boost system to improve networking performance, efficiency, and connection processing at cloud scale.

First unveiled in June 2025, AMD’s double-wide Helios AI rack will feature the chip company’s Zen 6 EPYC Venice CPUs, MI455X GPUs, and Pensando Vulcano network interface controllers (NICs), delivering 2.9 exaflops of four-bit floating-point precision (FP4) performance per rack.

AMD will begin shipping the rackscale solution to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.

“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,” AMD CEO Lisa Su noted. “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.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella added: “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. 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.”