- AMD shares rose over 5% in pre-market trading after announcing a partnership with Microsoft
- The collaboration includes AMD GPUs, CPUs, networking, and software for AI model inference on Azure
- Microsoft will deploy AMD's Helios Rackscale Solution for frontier AI model inference from 2026
AMD shares rose more than 5% in pre-market trading on Monday after the chipmaker announced an expanded strategic partnership with Microsoft to power frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model inference on Microsoft Azure.
AMD shares were up 5.36% in pre-market trading at $522.42 following the announcement.
The expanded collaboration spans AMD's GPUs, CPUs, networking technologies and software stack. At the centre of the partnership is Microsoft's deployment of the AMD Helios Rackscale Solution to power frontier AI model inference for Microsoft, Azure AI services and enterprise customers.
AMD said it will begin shipping the Helios platform to customers, including Microsoft, in the second half of 2026.
The AMD Helios Rackscale Solution combines AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs, sixth-generation AMD EPYC "Venice" CPUs, AMD Pensando networking and ROCm software into an integrated rack-scale platform designed for large-scale AI training and inference. Microsoft will initially use the platform for AI inference workloads across frontier models, Azure AI services and customer applications.
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Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said customers increasingly require AI infrastructure optimised for diverse workloads, including training, inference, data preparation, search and reinforcement learning.
As part of the announcement, Microsoft also unveiled two new Azure virtual machine (VM) series powered by sixth-generation AMD EPYC "Venice" processors.
The Azure HDv2 series is designed for agentic AI and data pipeline workloads, while the Azure HXv2 series targets semiconductor design applications. The additions expand Azure's AMD-powered infrastructure portfolio across AI, engineering and data-intensive computing.
The companies are also deepening their collaboration in cloud networking. Building on Microsoft's existing deployment of AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs), Azure Boost will integrate AMD technologies to improve networking performance, efficiency and connection processing across Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.
The partnership further expands access to AMD-powered AI infrastructure on Azure, enabling frontier AI model developers to train and deploy large-scale models while allowing enterprises to scale production AI workloads through Azure Foundry Managed Compute.
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