This has been an amazing year for Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) investors so far, as shares of the semiconductor specialist have jumped by an impressive 144%.
This incredible rally in AMD stock is well deserved, as the company is gradually becoming more influential in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market
The good news for investors is that AMD’s rally could get a nice shot in the arm when the company releases its second-quarter results after the market closes on Aug. 4, following a new development. AMD has just scored a big customer for its rack-scale AI server platform It has been just over a year since AMD announced that it will offer a next-generation AI server rack, known as Helios, to hyperscalers and AI companies. This rack-scale system integrates the chip designer’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs), Epyc server processors, Pensando networking chips, and enormous amounts of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to quickly process AI workloads in data centers.
AMD has already landed a major hyperscaler in the form of Meta Platforms to deploy Helios. And now, the chip designer has just announced that Microsoft will also deploy the Helios rack-scale servers in its Azure data centers “to power frontier model AI inference for Microsoft, its AI customers and support Azure AI services.” Additionally, Microsoft will use two additional Epyc server processors from AMD and increase adoption of Pensando chips to enhance its Azure networking services. AMD notes that it will start shipping Helios to Microsoft and other customers in the second half of 2026.