AMD preps rack-scale Helios systems to contend with Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL144

AMD offered its best look yet at the rack-scale architecture that'll underpin its MI400-series GPUs in 2026 at its Advancing AI event in San Jose on Thursday.

Codenamed Helios, the massive double-wide rack system is designed for large-scale frontier model training and inference serving. It'll be powered by 72 accelerators that have been made to look like one great big GPU by using Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) to pool their compute and memory resources.

If you're not familiar, UALink is a relatively new interconnect tech designed to provide an alternative to NVLink – the technology that made Nvidia's own rack-scale systems like the GB200 and GB300 NVL72 possible.

Helios's six dozen MI400s will come equipped with 432 GB of HBM4 memory good for 19.6 TBps of bandwidth and 40 petaFLOPS of 4-bit floating performance.

The GPUs will be paired to AMD's sixth-gen Epyc Venice ...